re: Florida QB situation couldn’t better illustrate players being bought by NIL

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If someone provided you a free house, paid for the utilities and paid for your food, it might not put actual money in your pocket, but it would certainly have a financial value.

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There's no dispute that it has "value". The question is one of relativity. Is that value provided reasonable relative to the amount of revenue generated? If the school/conference is bringing in hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue based, in part, on your efforts the perceived value of not having to pay for those items may be very small relative to the revenue generated. For instance, a player may be of the mindset that he'll happily pay for his own home, food, goods, etc in exchange for getting a reasonable share of the millions in revenue.

I get the tradition, pageantry, and nostalgia of college football and share in my joy of that. But the reality is major college football, even before NIL, the transfer rule, etc was FAR closer to a professional sport than an amateur scholastic extracurricular activity.