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80,000 fans aren't necessarily the ones footing the bill for NIL, though. The issue with this current model is nobody could go to the games and nobody could watch on TV but player salaries would still be funded by big money boosters. There's no correlation between a team's revenue, or the sport's revenue as a whole, and player salaries/NIL deals.
The NFL doesn't work this way. When overall viewership goes up, media deals gain value which increases media distribution to the franchises and raises salary caps with it when new media deals are signed. NFL teams are required to spend 89% of the salary cap over a 4 year span or pay the difference to their players because that money comes from media deals. The teams make most of their money from ticket sales, merchandise sales, and such but those don't pay salaries like they might in the MLB or even NBA which allows for a luxury tax when exceeding the salary cap.
For the NCAA to follow a similar model where wins and losses don't matter to "school" salary pools (insane to type), you'd need an NCAA-wide media deal that pays all schools the same and a salary cap that is the same across the board determined by that media deal. I doubt it'll ever happen. We'd be right back at boosters paying players under the table. It's going to have to start with boosters getting spending fatigue to spark change.
It will take some time for the fans of these schools to adjust to losing a few games a year when they're in the new "P2" consisting of maybe 40 teams max.
However, filling an average 80k stadium for maybe 20 games/wk is only about 1.5M people demanding tickets for each week's game. Out of over 300M people, I suspect they can still keep filling the stands, other than the few days of "dud" games or bad weather.
Now, I'm not sure about TV ratings, but there's so many T-shirt fans of these top 40 schools that I think they'll still watch.
I hope this greed and the extreme powering of the top few schools ends up biting them in the a$$, but I'm afraid they'll be successful. I don't mind them breaking away, I just wish they'd be forced to give up any relation to the school. Go create a stand-alone semi-pro league independent of the universities.
I haven't followed pro sports in decades, but my quick check shows the Cowboys have been varying between 6-9 and 13-3 for the past 20 years with minimal playoff success but from what I hear, they have plenty of demand for tickets, even when they suck. I realize they are a somewhat special team, but then again, so are these P2 teams, so I think the comparison is reasonably legit.
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