Again, thinking about the NFL and trying to tie that back to college football......how many NFL players have YouTube channels or Patreon accounts that they run? I can see, though, why those that are so inclined have a good argument that they should be allowed to do so.
I looked up the amount of money the Madden thing brings in, and the most recent data I could find is that Madden paid the NFLPA $50M in 2013 for the Madden license. That is old data, and maybe it has doubled in the last 6 years, so lets say it is now $100M/year. That works out to be ~$55k/player/year, so certainly not insignificant. It looks like the NFLPA stashes that money away for their "rainy day" fund, so it's not clear to me that the players actually see any of that directly. Let's assume that EA Sports would pay college football players half of what they pay NFL players, and then realizing that there are >2X the amount of P5 college football teams, and then again the fact that college football rosters are bigger than NFL rosters by about 1.5X, that works out to be ~$8k/year/CFB player. That certainly is not insignificant, but it also uses generous numbers and assumes that the money makes it to the players and isn't siphoned off by any middle men.
I'm a free market person to the core, so I want to err in that direction. I just don't see that the funds are there from endorsements and likeness deals to make a large difference. Then again, I am thinking about this from the vantage point of an adult, and must remember that $8,000 would have been a large sum of money to me as a college student.
What is the value of the stipends that the guys receive? Am I remembering correctly that it is in the $3k range per year?