Plus most athletes qualify for Pell Grants which is spending money in addition to their scholarship....
In professional sports everyone is getting paid, in college sports not everyone is going to get paid and that will create issues...
one of the issues of why college athletes were not getting paid is the fact that most college sports programs don’t make money and paying money to the athletes would not have been paid on what you earn...
In major college sport football pays the bills, some schools make big money on basketball, and a very few break even on baseball, all the other programs at most universities lose money....
So if you paid just the football players, immediately a suit would get filed and the result would be you would have to pay the women’s golf team, the men’s swimming team, etc...just to be equitable...
Throw in that college players can now transfer to another school and not sit out, which means they are free agents every year, don’t think for one second if Alabama needed a QB for next year, they wouldn’t go to the best QB at a lower level school and offer him 300-400k per year to transfer, schools will be raiding each other for talent....