I have to say it: this whole thread is playing around at the margins.
You want to reform college football before the Feds decide to do it for us? (They will, btw.) The answer is two fold. First, remove the incentives for using sports programs to make up the shortfalls in public financing. Public higher education has been underfunded relative to demand for over 50 years. We want young people to go to school, but we put substantial barriers of financing in their way and we don't build campuses to accommodate them. Instead, we ask them to take out loans that leave them indebted at exactly the wrong time in their lives. Then we tell higher education administrations that they need to "compete" for funds from private sources to make up for the differences between tuition receipts (still too low) and what they need to run the schools. What's the obvious way to attract such donors? Big time college sports would be my goto option for that. The donors to the sports programs get hit up all the time for other funds related to, you know, actually educating young people. (That's why we have colleges and universities, in case anybody forgot.) So … our first step has to be going back to the UC model: low tuitions and substantial building programs so that students who want to can go to school and colleges and universities can get back to Job One.
Second, turn every football (and other major sport) program in the country into Div. 3. There is no reason to have athletic scholarships at the public expense at all. If the pros want to put together a minor league football program and winnow out prospects, then let them pay for it. Public colleges and universities will field teams and play ball. They will also, of course, find ways to give "academic" scholarships to good players; I'm not denying that. Still, all the needless - entertaining, but needless - hoopla that now accompanies college athletics will be relegated to the sidelines. It'll stile on TV, of course - Ivy League games are - and there will still be conferences and TV contracts and some of the rest of it; I think we would be surprised at how quickly the entertainment side would adapt, especially if the pros don't field minor league teams.
Now, admittedly, step 2 here might actually require federal intervention. But make no mistake: the day is coming when the playing field will become so tilted that there will be irresistible pressure on them to act. All we have to do is keep on doing what we are already doing.