re: Why are there any rules for college sports for who is qualified to play?

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But, your point about schools refusing to enroll students is at the heart of my next point. In the end, it’s their school and they can make the determination as to who can enroll, what the rules are, what the requirements for graduation are, etc etc. why then does the same theory not apply to college sports?

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The individual schools are not enacting the rules determining eligibility for sports, outside of academic standards pertaining to enrollment as a student (not as an athletes). They are agreeing to operate under the NCAA and conference rules specifically pertaining to athletics. It's difficult to see a court forcing a school to enroll a guy as a student to who doesn't meet the school's academic requirements. Otherwise, there would have long been successful lawsuits seeking to force a school like Stanford to accept as a student an applicant with academic scores/metrics that didn't even meet the academic requirements to be accepted to Southern (NO). Schools have chosen to take athletes who maybe did not meet the school's academic requirements for regular students, but they have not been forced to do so.

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If you have a lemonade stand, I volunteer to come work for you and am your top salesman, I still don’t get to tell you how to run your business or what rules and regulations you can impose. Now I can threaten to walk and then you have to decide whether it’s worth it to let me have input, but that’s the free market at work. Not some judge telling you you have to let me have a say. That’s the part about all this that I have a hard time with. This whole “restricting the market” or “restraint of trade” can (and will) be applied to pretty much every situation

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The difference is there are thousands upon thousands of lemonade stands. No one entity has a monopoly on lemonade stands. If the employee doesn't like working at one lemonade stand there are thousands of others, run by different bosses, that he can choose to work or volunteer at.

That's not really the case in college football and basketball. There are essentially no other college football or basketball markets an aggrieved player can enter into where he can have access to what has become the lucrative NIL market. And that market is governed by one entity, the NCAA, and just a few major conferences.

In the 60's and 70's when ticket prices were cheap and there were no big TV contracts with the individual conferences football and basketball were still amateur sports. But starting in the 80's and snowballing in the late 90's/2000's the schools started to realize they could sell their product for more and more money. So they did. In turn, they moved football and basketball from scholastic extracurricular to a big BUSINESS pretending to be a scholastic extracurricular