parties to pay athletes to sponsor products? And what type of competitive advantage will this give certain teams?

Obviously the video game manufacturers will do this, but this probably doesn't create any advantage from one team to another. The video game companies will need to cut a check to every NCAA player to create a full game package. Game manufacturers aren't going to go out and negotiate one-on-one contracts with individual players. There are 11,000+ FBS players on rosters around the country. That's completely unmanageable.

Instead they'll take a package approach either with the NCAA as a whole or conference by conference. While those contracts will be, overall, big numbers, when you break it down, it won't be a ton of money to each player. Economics just won't allow it. You might see certain conferences get larger numbers than others, but when you do the math on what is reasonable for a video game company to pay for player name and likeness rights for a year, you're likely looking at less than $1000 per player. This probably has less of an impact that the full cost of attendance stipend that some schools pay out currently.

On the other end of the spectrum are local sponsorships. Bob Brown's Honda dealership can hire State U's QB to film an ad and pay him to endorse their cars. I would imagine that the NCAA will move towards trying to regulate these types of arrangements and require athletes to fully disclose the details of these arrangements to the NCAA so that the NCAA can police the transactions to ensure they are not smokescreens for paying players.

I"m trying to figure out how big of a problem this will really be and how much it will really affect recruiting and the competitive advantage in sports. I don't see it as a big an issue as many.