The good press and improved institutional name recognition, more or less, kept coming. But colleges could never really bring themselves to say straight out that they were doing this because it made good business sense in the minor league sports industry they were in. Somehow they could never bring themselves to say they hoped to make some money on the deal. Somehow that always seemed too crass, too exploitive, too uneducational. So they have stammered for most of the century, groping for euphemisms and alternative explanations for what it is that they are really doing, running minor league teams with a payroll, the currency for which is over the table scholarships and under the table cash.
Business is business.
And it later worked, most of the time, to avoid tax problems with assorted governmental bodies who thought these scholarships looked suspiciously like compensation to an employee. But colleges still had to come up with an explanation as to why they were running these minor league teams in the first place. Once they started play for pay, admittedly a rational business decision, they could no longer say they were sponsoring sports to enhance that athlete's educational experience. The Division III rationale was not seriously available. But this is a creative group.