Here's my rant.
We have now casually gone from something called student athletes (where many schools cheated the rules against paying them) into openly paying athletes to enroll and represent "our" schools in one or more sports. A few may actually be students trying to get a higher education than the relatively poor one many of our secondary schools are providing, but that's not why most are enrolled I would guess.
Then we expand beyond any distance that could reasonably be said to represent normal rivalries or schools at which relatively the same kinds of kids would attend.
Meanwhile we get a check from those who want to sell soap and find that people will watch our teams play while they sell the soap two or three dozen times during the game, putting the action on the field into secondary importance.
Then we open it to gambling on a larger than life scale, and only those who have never studied history fail to see the problem with that.
Now we put one of "them" in charge.
Maybe many or even most of those on the board have no problem with any of that, but it's a long ways from college athletics. It's TV entertainment designed to sell soap and to keep those gambling dollars rolling in.
For me, it would be more honest to eliminate the enrollment requirement and have various schools become minor league affilates of the completely professional leagues. I'd watch that. Since I don't gamble I wouldn't worry about fixers either. The universities would still get a big check to spend more money on professors who don't teach students anymore. Win win.
Then maybe some schools could start up their own college athletic teams made up of students and play near by teams home and home on a Saturday afternoon on a field somewhere on campus. I'd watch that too but for a different reason.
Right now it's all bread and circusses as the Romans said.