Yeah, now you're starting to catch on

So, let's use your own words here to help explain it to you:

"Notre Dame has the capacity to win and hundreds of other institutions currently offering collegiate sports and athletic scholarships will fail in the subsequent arms race. The bottom portion of the FBS will begin to de-emphasize football and other costly sports and only the "billionaire" programs will succeed."

All right, so if it is important for Notre Dame to keep those other non-billionaire programs around, they'll find a way to share the wealth, right? And if it isn't, they won't, right?

So why is it an athlete's problem? It sounds like a school problem. If the argument is that the current athletes should sacrifice so that other athletes can survive, you need to make a more compelling argument. Let's say that you are a division one athlete (so put yourself in the place of one of your cousins, I suppose); what value is there for you in ensuring that someone else whom you've never met who doesn't compete in the same sport you compete in and who goes to a different school than you gets a similar opportunity to you?

You want the athletes to sacrifice without having the schools sacrifice; you and people like you basically create the problem and then claim there is no solution without tearing the whole thing down and "ruining" it for everyone. You create the billionaire class, and then try and defend it. It's the labor that needs to sacrifice, not the ownership.

It's the same nonsense that people were saying about granting baseball players free agency in the 60's; "oh, if we take away the reserve clause it will ruin the game and the league will fold." Yeah, the courts disagreed and were proven right. Same thing with NFL free agency. "Oh, the small market clubs like Green Bay will be decimated." Didn't happen.