[Mudhead]

Showing that you are prepared to verge on the excessive and have the $ to do so , is also the only way to drive some sanity into this process.

I fail to see how this can be described as "sanity". "We must destroy the village in order to save it" comes to mind.

I know other schools who fear that Stanford will tumble to this and use its wealth to dominate the market for academically superior high talent players. I’d like to test this .

Stanford should therefore buy each and every athlete, good, bad, or mediocre. Stanford can monopolize college sports. Problem solved. The only problem with this approach is that some athletes don't want to "work" for Stanford. They don't necessarily enjoy it here. If they can get a lot of money elsewhere, we may not be able to "buy" them.

You are correct.  I think you will have to burn the village and then rebuild it. Eventually, that will happen. We can all conjecture what the new landscape will be but we will all probably be wrong. Either an “athletes as employees” model  with a collective bargaining agreement to regulate sports or replacement of student athletes  with club teams strikes me as the most likely outcomes. 

That may well take ten years to sort out. In the meantime you either get good at paying athletes or you get out of college sports. The student athlete model is a dodo bird. Wish it were not , but I fear it is.

[Mudhead]

Showing that you are prepared to verge on the excessive and have the $ to do so , is also the only way to drive some sanity into this process.

I fail to see how this can be described as "sanity". "We must destroy the village in order to save it" comes to mind.

I know other schools who fear that Stanford will tumble to this and use its wealth to dominate the market for academically superior high talent players. I’d like to test this .

Stanford should therefore buy each and every athlete, good, bad, or mediocre. Stanford can monopolize college sports. Problem solved. The only problem with this approach is that some athletes don't want to "work" for Stanford. They don't necessarily enjoy it here. If they can get a lot of money elsewhere, we may not be able to "buy" them.

You are correct.  I think you will have to burn the village and then rebuild it. Eventually, that will happen. We can all conjecture what the new landscape will be but we will all probably be wrong. Either an “athletes as employees” model  with a collective bargaining agreement to regulate sports or replacement of student athletes  with club teams strikes me as the most likely outcomes. 

That may well take ten years to sort out. In the meantime you either get good at paying athletes or you get out of college sports. The student athlete model is a dodo bird. Wish it were not , but I fear it is.