YES, THERE IS A legit REASON WHY THE NCAA HAS A RULE AGAINST COLLEGE ATHLETES RECEIVING OUTSIDE INCOME

I have been seeing some stuff about how the rule against NCAA athletes having outside income is stupid and unfair and should be done away with.  Here’s my response, written in reaction to a post by Coyote pointing out that there’s no rule against student artists receiving income for their work:
The reason why no one cares if music students make money from outside sources is pretty obvious to me as a former music student: no one (outside of the music school) cares if your university has great student musicians, but lots of people care if your university has great student athletes.  Why is that?  Because music schools don’t participate in interscholastic competitions that produce enormous prestige, publicity, and wealth for the university, while athletic departments do.  And why does that matter?  Because the prestige, publicity and wealth produced by those interscholastic athletic competitions give the university and people associated with it big incentives to try to recruit the best athletes, incentives that don’t exist with musicians (again, outside of the music school, anyway).  That’s why there are rules against people associated with the university offering no-show jobs and other even more blatant payola (see, e.g., Sean Miller) to recruit great athletes to their school.   That’s the type of “outside income” that the rule was created to prohibit.