Perhaps the BEST B1G Forum anywhere, here at College Football Fan Site, CFB51!!!

If someone offered Noah Fant $500K to finish his senior season including a bowl game, would it be worth the risk?

Insurance companies make their money by saying yes to questions like that. Always taking the guaranteed decent money at the risk of very rarely losing big. Of course, part of this is personal/emotional, so I can't be 100% sure players would treat it the same way, but that's part of the point. There's nothing unprincipled or (net) unfair about doing the experiment and seeing how they would respond.

Letting kids on a lower middle class or pre-poverty line trajectory collect the few hundred thousand they've already proven they deserve, well that's a completely other thing.

I get that but the NFL is in that business.Fairly certain that it is not in a University Charter to advance a non-scholastic grid iron career

We have coaches who say "F you" to the recruits who they made promises to, and jump at the next better offer; so I don't see why we have a problem with players saying "F you" to their teammates and to the fans whose support pays for their scholarship.  But that's why I then also don't have a problem as a fan, saying from from a competition perspective, I don't like either the idea of big programs being able to pay to swing the balance even farther in their favor, or the idea of players skipping bowl games.  I can understand it, and not blame them for it, and still dislike it.

It's also already the case that P5 universities and ADs are financially insulated from one another and a bit of a joke that the ADs get the universities' tax exempt status anyway. Revenue sports aren't just business. They are BIG business.

At this point it's a bit hilarious that all of these large universities get tax exempt status period.  UM just bought the land that had always been the lumber store we went to for like $24 million.  They wrote a big check, and now 6.1 acres comes off the property tax ledger for the city.

Sports are about tribalism. Most people cheer for their tribe and care much less about how good their tribe is. Though it is always easier to cheer for a winning tribe.

This is the truth. Most people I know are fans of a team, a jersey, etc. not for the quality of the product. Would I be happy if Ohio State suddenly became bad? of course not. Would I stop watching? No.  As a life long fan of the Browns, too young to remember the last championship, I have never stopped rooting and watching them for the last 52 years in spite of how bad they have been since 1999.
Sorry nothing you all can say would convince me that most people would stop watching college football if they product lost 250 top end players.

A tax exempt entity can of course make huge profits (at least in theory).  That status relates more to how the money is to be spent than that the entity is "nonprofit", which is usually misunderstood.

A thing I dislike is for some tax exempt entity to pay CEOs et al. huge sums (on which they pay income taxes of course).  I'd prefer to see some kind of limit on that as a function of the size of the entity.

No I get that.
I just see a problem with that entity continuing to buy up an entire city.

At the risk of putting the thread back on topic, Jones says he's playing.

Jones who?