I spoke to someone recently that worked for a Power 5 conference for 20+ years and has served many different prominent roles in college athletics, and as we remarked on the inevitable, he posed this to me:
"How will you feel about college football when they cease to be student-athletes entirely, even if that term has been outdated for years?"
He noted that when the revenue-sharing model lands on the doorstep, he expects scholarships to disappear. He expects a tiered compensation structure that starts with every freshmen getting a base salary and then bonuses based on playing time/impact. He thinks the salary will go up a bit each year and there will be financial rewards for staying at a school all four or five years. He thinks depending on productivity you will get more money, with a pool at the end of the year of say $5M that gets distributed based on that production. But he was adamant that scholarships are gone. He said the athletes will have about $50K to do with as they please (that being the salary as freshmen and likely $200,000 by senior year for every player plus bonuses for the stars). If that means they want to take classes, so be it, but no one will be able to force them to do so. He said essentially you will have an 85-player minor league walking around campus, living where they want to live, partying when they want to party, going to class only if they want to go to class. He estimates less than 25% of every recruiting class will graduate (and thought 25% was extremely generous).
He also thinks the moment compensation is not tied to education, Title IX will cease to exist. He expects sports like softball and field hockey the athletes will still get paid and the teams will exist but he doesn't think the compensation will have to be comparable. So a softball player coming in as a freshman might get $5,000 while football gets $50,000. He said athletes in non-revenue sports will be BEGGING to go back to the old model.
Anyway, this is one person's theory, but listening to him on it, it sure made a lot of sense.
You and I have never been on the same plane as Charles Woodson but if you went to Michigan you could always draw the connection that Woodson walked the same halls you did, went to many of the same classes, had something akin to the experience you did as a student. But now, a Woodson would just be a professional athlete living in Ann Arbor and playing football at The Big House.