The entire thing is the student athletes playing the game.

Athletic departments are staffed by fully compensated administrators and staff. Some of them compensated quite handsomely. People making livings based off of the student athletes. The guys making videos about them, the equipment managers, the facilities people, the marketing departments, and goodness, most of all the coaches getting paid millions a year by the schools themselves and assistants getting compensated. All revolving about young students playing a sport. But the students get....a scholarship.

Why wouldn't the athletes that the entire system is built around not be allowed to even seek compensation outside that system for their own name, image, likeness when the universities are often using those very things to drive more sales enabling even more exorbitant compensation for those working within the system around those student athletes?

It was the most bizarre form of indentured servitude of the modern day until NIL finally arrived.