The history of how we got here is very odd. The NCAA's worship of amateurism has it's roots in Ivy League gentleman amateurs, and for many, many years was explicitly racially segregated.
The roots were very much more in the public's insistence that college students had to stop dying while playing football. Lots of players were paid in the old Ivy League days. Those like Theodore Roosevelt who "saved" the game did so mostly by not letting students handle the payments. Only much later (1940s and '50s) did NCAA take on the form it has today.
