College is not a workplace. Playing for your school is not employment. These athlete are not adults by any measure other than arbitrary legal fiction.
The issue that Cruze is talking about is resentment and morale among a bunch of 18-22 year old student-athletes. When Golden Boy freshman QB gets a million dollar NIL deal and never plays a minute, but lives like a rap star, while 5th year senior starting left tackle is busting his ass for meal money or close to it, what do you think that does to a locker room, morale, etc? Or when the girl on the end of the bench on her basketball team that never plays is getting $1 million a year because she looks great in a swimsuit, while the starting point guard has to take a Greyhound bus to get home for Thanksgiving, is that good for team unity?
One of the biggest issues I have with the current state of college as an institution --not limited to sports--is that, relatively recently, a caste system has been created in a setting that has always been intended to be as egalitarian as possible. Now kids from wealthier families can live in newer luxurious dorms while kids who are there on student aid live in the old places that all of them used to live in together for 150 years before. Everyone knows the rich kids are in Dorm A while the poor kids are in Dorm B. This NIL bullshit is just one more major step in that same wrong direction. That is not the way it's supposed to be. People have the rest of their lives after they get their education to live in that world.
NIL as it presently exists is a travesty by any reasonable measure.