The revenue producing college sports (I. E. Football and mens basketball) have been ripping off the athletes for decades. There is no correlation between athletic ability and the ability to perform college level studies. Hockey and baseball players have the option of full-time employment , paying junior and minor leagues. Basketball and football players have no realistic option. The colleges should end the fiction that the illiterate felons that are the vast bulk of Division I “student-athletes” in the revenue producing sports are in any serious way “students.” Let the free market determine their value, don’t impose any academic requirements on them, treat them as employees. When they rape the co-Ed’s, make the schools pay. The hypocrisy ends.
I don't see the "ripoff".
The highly recruited, Power 5 conference players are the exception rather than the rule. The overwhelmingly majority of college football and basketball players really are "student-athletes", have no pro aspirations, and are just playing for the love of the game and/or scholarship. The current system works well for them.
It also allows a lot of guys to somewhat hedge their bets. They go and play for their college and if they do really well, may have a shot at the pros. But otherwise, they can still come out of the experience with a college degree.
If there was no college football, then the only alternative would be minor leagues which tend to pay very poorly and that offer nothing as a fallback like a college education. The kind of minor league system that baseball has can't exist solely because of the antitrust exemption, which neither football nor basketball have. There is no way that the pro teams in those sports are going to invest money in a minor league system when they cannot retain the rights to the players in that minor league system.