Every facet of life is transactional and you rarely get more than you give. If you’re married and have kids, you know this empirically.
Nearly every one of us work to make other people more money than we get, too. So you could say we are all being taken advantage of.
Part of the allure of college sports is that they are NOT professionals. We know it’s not the highest level product out there, but we’re bound to it by our dedication to the school. In exchange for an education that is supposed to give them a foundation to build the rest of their lives on, they get to do things most people only dream of doing.
In an effort to bring some equity to the college athletes, they possibly created the most inequitable system possible in the NIL. Some kids will get obscene amounts of money, while the ones protecting them from getting body-slammed by the next Jevon Kearse will get next to nothing.