Why do you assume that paying the athletes will have any meaningful impact on expenses? I will be using my numbers from [1]. Coming in at 65 on expenditure, University of Kansas spends $14 million on football. At the time of the article, they hadn't been to a bowl game in a decade and the drought has since continued. I'm sorry Jayhawks, but the program isn't good at all. First, no school is going to remove scholarships because that's an easy way for the university to pay their athletes. Paying the football players $10k per year would only cost an additional $1.05M for a 105 man roster. That's less than 10%. That is easily covered by increasing price of tickets by $2 in their 50,000 capacity stadium over the course of the season. But students watch for free? Well, not really, they already paid in their student fees. So fees have a one time increase of $2. But more realistically, these are football players that will never go to the NFL. They are happy for a free education and the Jayhawks would never pay them in additional to what they give them already. These rules apply solely to the top 10 teams that wish they could pay the top recruit of the nation $100k. I say that all of this is easily fixed by giving the players 10% of their jersey sales. It is completely insane that the NCAA can make money off of a person's likeness and not pay them which is illegal in most states.
We saw during Covid that as soon as there was a tiny bit of financial stress on athletic departments they immediately started cutting non-revenue sports, here's a fairly complete list from the last year:
You can see from that list that the vast majority of sports that were cut were non-revenue, men's sports. $1.05M lost to paying the football team could just as likely be covered by cutting one or two non-revenue sports as it is by raising ticket prices. The reality is attendance of college football games was already down before Covid, even for powerhouse schools like the University of Georgia:
It is extremely unlikely that even the biggest football schools will be able to cover the cost of paying their players through increase ticket prices when they are already concerned about filling seats.
I wouldn't constitute COVID "a tiny bit of financial stress". That list is clearly temporary cuts. Stanford "cut" all sports programs and now they are all back. Your second article states that fans just prefer to watch on TV. Thus, the schools will make it back in more lucrative TV contracts.
But your entire argument lacks the essential point that salaries will be market driven. That, already, most programs cannot pay for their athletes. That scholarships and world class facilities and coaching are more than sufficient compensation. Scholarships again being pennies on the dollar for the university. We're talking on the order of a dozen schools that are willing to pay and 100 players that will realistically get any type of meaningful compensation.
[1] - https://www.syracuse.com/orangefootball/2017/08/which_school...