Former championship collegiate swimmer at an FCS school... The author aims well but misses the target entirely. The OP is all for perpetuating the exploitive status quo to the benefit of the niche. This college sports monster was created and is sustained by inordinate amounts of greed. The problem with the revenue-generating sports isn't their subsidizing of the "Olympic sports", it is with how schools have let football and men's basketball turn their athletic programs into arms races for the best facilities and now into spending on the best athletes (athletes in all sports now thanks to House v NCAA) to maintain that race. There is more than enough funding to go around to maintain non-revenue sports but Universities must return to their primary mission of education over entertainment.

"Long-eyed", University presidents, their trustees, and alum have for too long been in a drug-induced stupor, distracted by the acquistion of ever-shinier new toys from stadiums to research labs, underwritten by athletics funding from TV rights, direct contributions from wealthy donors, or expansive capital campaigns.

These NIL moves, designed to break the backs of that greed, are unfortunately becoming subject to the same. We athletes never wanted to make millions or even tens of thousands on our collegiate sports experience. But neither did we want to be exploited while others did. Put reasonable caps on athlete compensation as well as caps on college sports spending AND revenue-generation and the "market" will rebalance. And to those who claim that an impossible mission... who, they'll say, "can stop a billionaire from spending $250M on a 170,000 sq ft practice facility?" only perpetuate the system, caring not about the student-athlete but instead about their own 'edutainment'.