Why do you assume that paying the athletes will have any meaningful impact on expenses? I will be using my numbers from [1]. Coming in at 65 on expenditure, University of Kansas spends $14 million on football. At the time of the article, they hadn't been to a bowl game in a decade and the drought has since continued. I'm sorry Jayhawks, but the program isn't good at all. First, no school is going to remove scholarships because that's an easy way for the university to pay their athletes. Paying the football players $10k per year would only cost an additional $1.05M for a 105 man roster. That's less than 10%. That is easily covered by increasing price of tickets by $2 in their 50,000 capacity stadium over the course of the season. But students watch for free? Well, not really, they already paid in their student fees. So fees have a one time increase of $2. But more realistically, these are football players that will never go to the NFL. They are happy for a free education and the Jayhawks would never pay them in additional to what they give them already. These rules apply solely to the top 10 teams that wish they could pay the top recruit of the nation $100k. I say that all of this is easily fixed by giving the players 10% of their jersey sales. It is completely insane that the NCAA can make money off of a person's likeness and not pay them which is illegal in most states.
[1] - https://www.syracuse.com/orangefootball/2017/08/which_school...