I wish the NFL would step in and just declare the NCAA a development league

Hard pass for me. This does get to the problem though, which is that there is no minor league for pro American football and the NFL has worked very hard to keep it this way. Why can’t they create their own feeder league, parallel to CFB, for those that don’t want to “play school” (which is probably most athletes tbh). The draft could draw from both CFB and this “G-League”. Yeah, CFB would vastly diminish in scale, but it would keep all the history/traditions while hopefully cutting back on the sham classes, coaching salary arms race, and NIL drama.

That’s why I had so much hope for the XFL in 2020. It seemed to offer an alternate path for players to get paid (that was pre-NIL) and skip school. If only it had come a few years earlier to take hold before CFB seemed to cross the Rubicon with NIL, the transfer portal, and conference realignment.