I'll just say this. There was a certain perverse aspect of paying players under the table, at least in the SEC world, and I won't go into the hundreds-of-years-old psychology of it. But there was also a limit to it. Think of it like blackmail, but in reverse. "I can pay this player $X, and he can't really complain about wanting more, because if it comes out that he took money up front, he'll lose his eligibility".
Now that these deals are more open, they are also starting to approach a more realistic market value. In the past, if a player was paid $100K and that money went to help his family economically, it wasn't based on anything like "oh, he'll be an official spokesman for my company, and that is worth a certain amount of money on the open market". It was just based on whatever minimal amount it would take the kid to sign the Faustian bargain.
Now that players are able to use multiple schools as leverage...and some of these fancy car dealers are hesitant to make a black athlete the "face" of their car dealership...then the most gunshy of these older SEC crackers are going to hesitate a few minutes. It's one thing to make an illicit $100K payment to a recruit when everyone has to keep the dirty little secret...it's another thing to openly put your arm around a black athlete and then put his face on the billboards for your company...
