<blockquote>It would be nice to end this column here. But, of course, not everyone agrees. Some people—the most salient are the generously compensated college sports executives and the lawyers they pay to defend the status quo in antitrust court—insist that athletes <a href="https://www.si.com/more-sports/2010/08/26/pay-college" target="_blank" rel="noopener">can’t be paid because they’re amateurs, and that they’re amateurs because they can’t be paid.</a></blockquote>
via <a href="https://deadspin.com/this-is-how-to-pay-college-athletes-1823353456">This Is How To Pay College Athletes</a>.

And then the article meanders into this.
<blockquote>So what is the best plan for paying players? <em>No plan at all</em>. If Kentucky wants to offer basketball recruits $500,000 signing bonuses, fine. If <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/11/sports/ncaafootball/notre-dame-president-stands-firm-amid-shifts-in-college-athletics.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Notre Dame <em>doesn’t </em>want to offer football recruits a penny more than their athletic scholarships</a>, that’s also fine.</blockquote>
No, that's not fine.  A free for all could destroy the golden goose of college basketball.  The players need a union and some kind of compensation which includes guaranteed scholarships and other things for playing in tournaments.

Like pro sports, professional college basketball and football needs to be run like a cabal to survive.  As long as the players, as a class, get a certain percentage of the loot let the player's union figure out how to divvy it up.  Right now they don't even have a union.  One step at at time!