I see that there are a lot of 'factors' that are not used to giving ground that are being set up against each other, and I don't think it's going to end well or be very predictable.

1) Money: The sports of football and basketball are wildly popular in the US. Our appetite for football is effectively bottomless. Putting that much of it on the air is going to test how bottomless it is. Additionally, the 'lesser' sports that aren't in the TV money making arena are still going to have access to NIL money. This is especially true with Olympic sports, where every four years or so, these elite athletes are going to get a bust of cash from sponsors. For the 'lesser' sports, they will finally have longer term spokespersons that can keep the hype going through the off Olympic years, and the athletes will want this as well. Turning these athletes into money making machines is not going to be something that sponsors want to get rid of.

2) Laws: There are massive Title-9 violations all over the place. Lets look at Stanford students in particular. Their admissions policy is a bit unique in that sports are 'not considered' in admits (who know how true that is for football). The 'lesser' sports' athletes really are there for the education, mostly. Now, with the very long travel distances to the east coast or to SMU, that is putting a de facto undue burden on the women's teams, especially if they aren't flying the same airlines as the men's football team. Combine this with the NIL money that these 'lesser' sports are gong to get, and they can finally hire a real law firm that can go toe-to-toe with the army of lawyers from the university.

3) Banks: There are many schools that have decided to recently re-vamp their fields and facilities. Those are on long term mortgages and other contracts with the various banks of the nation. If these teams start sucking, or are in bad conferences, then there is a huge incentive to change that by the school. Still, there are going to be a lot of teams that just aren't going to do well. And their mortgages are going to start looking like really really bad ideas from the bank's perspective.

4) Governing boards: Some schools are governed by a board of regents. Some are governed by just a president. Some are governed by the state legislature. Some are governed by the Catholic church. All of these petite tyrannies and oligarchies are used to getting their way. Now, they are all going to be competing with each other for giant piles of money. Governing entities that have more legal powers than others are going to be incentivized to use those legal powers to try to grab more of that money. And once one does something galling, all the others are going to be forced to follow suit and try to outbid that gall.

5) Mothers: Mommas don't want their boys playing football anymore. The game is largely seen as too violent and damaging. Yeah, not all the mothers see that, by any means. But the statistics point to a marked and continuing decrease in the number of boys playing. This is a big threat to the pipeline going into football. Other sports aren't really seeing this issue however, outside of women's soccer. But as most of the issues with the conferences are centered around football, mothers end up being a factor.

6) Attention: This is the main issue, I think. The dynamics are pushing schools to have billion dollar programs to survive. These things kinda end up as power law distributions. And as programs get more money, they tend to win more. The system will settle on programs that are very successful and very expensive. To say yet another way, winners will keep winning. Without some sort of balancing factors (player draft, players' unions, salary caps, etc) the winning teams will largely be known before the season starts, just based on expenditures. That's where the attention issue comes in. Who is going to want to watch a game, let alone a season, where you already know the outcomes? Yes, football is uniquely random and therefore exciting. But putting a billion dollars out there on 18-22 year olds is not what 'smart money' wants to do. That kinda gets back to 1) Money, but I hope you see where this goes. Carefully built teams will minimize the risk to the money and therefore the game will be boring. No one wants to watch one of 10 teams play in the playoffs yet again, year after year, with the same heavy favorites again and again. Without some sort of balancing, the same teams are just going to keep on winning as their power law distributed expenditures dictate.

Any one of these factors could easily become the dominate factor in the new college sports landscape, and many will change with time, especially as things wind their way through legislatures and courts. Who knows how things are going to go. All I know is that the action off the field is going to be just as exciting as the action on it.