This will be controversial, and I have no dog in this race so have at it, but there have been [impractical] thinkers who have said that for the big money sports there should be no college athletics.
Instead their imagined "utopian"sports situation would be that every college town have a semi-pro team with whatever salaries it could afford. If a student was good enough to both play ball and go to the school, he/she had opportunity to try to do that. If someone had no interest in schooling, then they could try to get into whatever team they could at whatever salary they could [in hopes, no doubt of making an impression on the pros].
The Utopian theorists view this as removing the schizophrenia of wanting big-time "college" sports and having to put up with players who have little interest in college and would like to get paid as if it were a job. People who had the juice to do both still had opportunity to do so. In place of the two-way person's scholarship would be his salary at the independent local team.
All this breaks down, of course, for many reasons, one of which is that it would be unlikely that "The South Bend Irish" would maintain the fanatical ticket-buying base that the "Notre Dame Irish" do. But that's Utopia for you.
