re: Coach Bryant threw out the solution to college sports years ago: End recruiting.

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No. Just limit the amount of money the NCAA and schools can bring in off televised games. TV companies will all pay the same price to broadcast the games and it would be dirt cheap. The TV companies can make as much money as they want off it.

TV companies can bid for rights of certain conferences by the perks offered like extra coverage, dedicated channels, more coverage for smaller sports, etc.

If you eliminate anyone associated with colleges from profiting off it it, the issues go away.

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Live sports are valuable to content providers because they command huge advertising dollars. A simplified, made up number version of a deal that is normally made is that Coke, McDonald's and Ford pay $1 a piece for each viewer and $2 for viewers who are in a target demo. ABC knows that NCAA football can bring in (again making up) 20M viewers in the target demo per game on 50 games over a season. NBC knows this to. So both ABC & NBC are both willing to pay $5.5B to the NCAA for the rights to broadcast the game because that'll leave them with a healthy $500M profit given the ad revenue.

In your paradigm, the NCAA will capped as to what it is able to ask for from the networks. But Coke, McDonald's, and Ford still only care about the viewer figures and 20M people still watch the game every week. So essentially you will be with you price cap, just gifting the network billions of dollars. Why would you do this? The tv companies are the least value additive participant in the whole value chain. Why do they get the windfall. Further, recently the conference realized that networks weren't adding any value whatsoever and started their own. Who, in your paradigm, would get the money from networks owned by the conferences?