This reminds me of the story of Devon Ramsay, the UNC football player featured in last year's "Schooled: The Price of College Sports" documentary.
First, if you haven't seen the documentary, I recommend it to everyone. It's very interesting and has started to change my opinion on the whole college model, paying players, etc. Very enlightening and thought provoking. It's available on Netflix.
Ramsay wasn't your typical UNC student-athlete that's been portrayed in the media. He actually cared about his education. Long story short, he sent his paper to a tutor to proofread before submitting, as he often did. Not because he needed them to write it, but because he was vigilant about his work and wanted another set of eyes. The tutor edited some stuff and sent it back to him. He submitted it. A while later (it was like a year or two), his email exchange gets flagged and sent to the NCAA as part of some wider investigation (IIRC). The NCAA comes down on him and he's suspended. He's later reinstated as he was one of the few that was unfairly punished.
After reading Fowler's article above, there's some renewed hope that the situation with our players is similar and they truly didn't believe what they, or the tutor(s), were doing was wrong. The difference is ND is conducting the investigation and not the NCAA. IIRC, UNC's investigation didn't uncover any wrongdoing (shocker!) in Ramsay's case, and/or other cases, but the NCAA dropped the hammer anyway because clearly some f'ed up shit was going on.
Best case scenario, it's similar to Ramsay's circumstances and the players are found of minimal or no wrongdoing resulting in immediate reinstatement or a "slap on the wrist" (i.e. 1-4 game suspension). I don't think this is the likely story/outcome for ALL four of the players, but I'm holding out hope it's the case for some of them.
