NOTE: I know the following is long, feel free to skip, I am talking to Orange Crush and giving him a response I've owed him for awhile.
It seems to me that you guys are going a bit further though. You are saying that a league of teams where guys voluntarily go play a game in exchange for tuition, room, board and living expenses, etc., totalling in many cases, in excess of $ 100,000 per year, not to mention social and networking perks, CANNOT be allowed to exist. But why can that league not exist where participation is voluntary? Should that league be punished because it's popular? The fact is it's popular because people have fanatical loyalty to the schools more so than the players, and the players choose to play in that school league to "exploit" the fanaticism people have to those schools and gain greater exposure and a better chance of being noticed by pro football teams. You see I would watch UT football if it was high school level talent. I really don't give a dang who the players are or how talented they are. I suspect there are quite a few people like me. The players take advantage of that attitude also, it's not a one way street.
I actually am not against college players getting paid though, especially for their name, image and likeness, but you are being extremely naive if you think alot of the payments being made right now are actually because company's see a value in the players name, image and likeness. Hell naw, most of these agreements, probably 99% don't have a chance in hell of turning a profit. The payments are being made to steer the players to a certain school (or keep them at a certain school) not because those "marketing" rights are really worth that much value wise. And when I say value, I'm talking about like if a shampoo company pays Tom Brady for his NIL rights to put him in their commercial, the shampoo company is banking on being able to sell enough shampoo as a result of Brady's endorsement (compared to without his endorsement) to offset the cash they are paying Brady and still make more money than they would have otherwise without Brady's endorsement. If the player's NIL is really that valuable, why is it necessary to have the "hooks" in the agreement (daily appearances signing autographs at Tuscaloosa businesses for example) to make it impossible to play for another school? Why should it matter what school they play for? (Note: as I said on like the first page of this thread Nico's deal should be grandfathered in because retroactive enforcement of these more express rules that just came out last week is complete crap, it's not fair to him, when the rules could have come out last year).
Back to the main issue though, let's say we get a semi pro league set up where these kids get drafted straight out of high school, play for 4-5 years, no school to worry about and are employees of the league, with benefits, etc., the whole 9 yards. What if there are kids who STILL want to just play football in exchange for a free education? Should they be allowed to do so? At what point should the ability of this voluntary education based/amateur league to exist be taken away? When the players become too good? When the education related league becomes too popular again? You see the players gain something by being associated with the school also, in fact if these two 18-23 year old leagues, one semi-pro/minor league, one education/ school based amateur league were allowed to exist side by side, I bet the education based league would still be more popular because of people like me, who are really rooting for the school of their state or that they went to. The University of Tennessee Vols will always be more popular than the Knoxville Argonauts or whatever.
I think the amateur-education based league should be allowed to exist and the association of schools should be allowed to enforce their amateur status. And there is no law against the development of a semi-pro league right now though. The NCAA isn't going out and trying to shut semi-pro leagues down. Truth is, the folks that want the semi pro approach are the ones doing that, they don't want to compete with the education-centric/amateur league, they want to take a short cut by taking over the education-centric/amateur league, effectively destroying it, and co-opt the popularity of the schools and their brand. That's not fair either. Rather, both leagues semi-pro and education-centric/amateur, should be allowed to exist and the education-centric/amateur league that exists should not be destroyed simply because the semi-pro people find it hard to compete with.