Booster involvement in contracts will never be allowed! College sports will not exist
the power five would harvest ALL the talent and leave everyone further behind.
So your alternative is what; the status quo where kids create value for the school but have
zero opportunity to ever collect on any of it beyond their generous scholarship (which is enhanced with academic support)? I don't see the schools ever paying anything beyond a modest cash stipend. They don't ever want to be in a position to call this labor and as importantly, they dont want to be also in a position of deciding recruit X gets a 20k salary and recruit Y gets 50k. They dont want to get directly involved in pay grades and what is sure to be a somewhat foolish endeavor assigning specific values to kids. Instead, let the fan market place do that for you.
As for the power 5, they are already harvesting most of the talent; so what could change? What gives the G5 any chance in todays environment and in the future is the same as it has always been: playing time & patience to allow for player development. Most P5 schools are taking the kids that a much closer to a finished product. Most of the G5 schools are taking kids that need 1-3 years of development. Thanks to the fact that humans grow at different speeds, we have to wait to see if that four star kid is already maxed out as an 18 year old while that two star kid just needs 18 more months to grow into their body to become a four star kid. This here is the beauty and the awesome chaos of college football.
That all said, there are two big holes in the "unlimited" comp environment:
i) Some schools will find a sugar daddy to (Tilman Ferrita in Houston and T Boone Pickens in Ok St) to lure in talent in a big way far outpacing their fellow schools.
ii) The G5 will be especially prone to losing transfers to the P5 when they do develop players. The stars of the G5 schools will certainly be cherry picked.
The only solution I have for both of these concerns would be to get technical with the scholarship cap by running a four year avg wins formula which would reduce scholarships down to 75 for persistent winning programs and up to 95 for losing programs. The formula would also allow for losing programs to have more liberal rules to allow for incoming transfers to have immediate playing time and the opposite for winning programs (for example, teams will a four year avg winning percentage of less than 40% would be allowed 4 immediate playing time transfers from the G5 or P5 the following season while teams with a winning percentage above 60% would be allowed just 1 immediate playing time transfer from the G5 or P5). Tons of talented kids wash out of the P5 every year when they realize they arent going to get the playing time. That talent could be more effectively redistributed downward by granting immediate playing time waivers more liberally to losing programs.
