I just gave some money to The Tech Way and want to see how this goes.
Here is my (probably naive over-optimistic) hope: Players should have been getting a stipend for sports, since it takes all their time prohibits any sort of PT work opportunities available to other students. NCAA blew their chance to provide leadership and oversight, so here we are. I hope we have enough money to, for example, pay all our starters in football a comfortable stipend, like ~$2-3k/mo, with a handful of proven stars getting a bit more. By proven, I mean on the college level, no huge deals for 18 year olds fresh out of h.s., over half of whom will never actually achieve their purported potential.
No $M deals at GT, not who we are. Hopefully this is enough to recruit our usual 3/4 star players who fit GT and can be developed into a competitive team.
At some point, I figure the TA&Ms of the world will come to their senses and realize throwing money at football only goes so far, along with everyone finally agreeing on some common sense rules regarding the transfer portal.
If not, then maybe D1 splits into an absurd two level pro/am structure and we’ll stay on the amateur side, so be it, and I’ll still support the basic stipend concept out of a sense of fairness.