People need to stop thinking that the NCAA has any power over college football, it has basically no power over college football.
Everything other than student eligibility is pretty much handled by the P5 conferences. Technically the NCAA is also in charge of enforcement but its enforcement arm was basically neutered years ago because the big programs aren't interested in anything other than window dressing when it comes to following rules.
In many ways the NCAA has no interest in college football given it gets $0 revenue from college football. 90% of the NCAA's budget comes from its TV contract for March Madness. The rest of it comes from the various chamionship games it does run. And of course the NCAA returns almost 90% of its revenue back to its member institutions.
I also find it amusing that anyone is naive enough to think that NIL and the portal will benefit anyone other than the top schools.
The top schools will simply let their players that didn't work out move to lesser programs and will take the better players on the lesser programs that played out. Also, we have already seen that the top level recruits that don't play out at a blue blood type school will be given another chance at a different blue blood school and won't have to go to a lesser program.
NIL is simply legalized booster payments and the schools with the biggest boosters will have the largest NIL payments. Keep in mind that the schools themselves are not allowed to have NIL programs - that would be direct payment from the schools to the players and is not legal under the current NIL rules. But NIL payments from anyone else is ok (which is fine by me, we just need to understand what that means).
The primary purpose of the portal and the NIL is to benefit the blue bloods - they were the ones pushing hardest for both of them.
In college basketball, where it is easier to keep a better competitive balance, alot of low to mid-major schools largely lose most of their rosters every year due to better programs picking off their players. In college basketball the avg last year was that every team lost more than 1/3 of their roster to the portal. Last year 1,663 players went into the portal for college baketball. Last year there were 4,589 players on scholarship. You can do that math - 36% of college basketball players went into the portal.
College football is in an interesting place. It's in person attendance has dropped every year since 2012 (except for this year due to the increase by not having seating restrictions compared to last season). College football is not a particularly young sport based on demographics of those who watch it on TV. Based on Neilsen data and a couple of research studies the avg age of the college football TV watcher is between 45-50, it is highly white (80%, 8% black, 8% Hispanic, 4% everything else), and overindexes in the South and the Midwest. It does skew more educated than most other sports. If you wanted to draw a picture of the 'typical' college football fan it would be a middle-age white male who attended college and lives in the South or Midwest.
Schools are starting to get a higher percentage of revenue from TV rights than in-person revenue. But it is the im-person revenue that separates the blue blood type programs from the others. They make so much more in-person that it just laps the other schools.
