Let's look at this question asked by Bowlsby:
Quote:Will the conference model exist?
That's a big part of what he's getting at.
Maybe it doesn't make sense, going forward, for a school to be part of the same conference and the same "NCAA division" for each sport. We already see a little of that: The current top-division national champ in men's basketball plays in the second division in football, in a football-only conference. (CAA Football is a separate football-only league and not part of the CAA, though the name is shared.)
There's no reason we can't have that across all sports. There doesn't even need to be the same number of divisions in each sport. There might be six football divisions, four basketball divisions, two soccer divisions, etc.
Schools could pick and choose their division (and league, maybe) for each sport, perhaps subject to both minimum and maximum financial limits (e.g., on one end, a school that plays in a middle-school-sized gym and pays its coaches $25,000/year shouldn't be playing top-division basketball, and on the other end, a school with a $100 million annual athletic budget probably shouldn't be permitted to go "trophy hunting" by competing in Division 3 baseball or Division 4 swimming).
Another possibility for a post-NCAA world is that most "Olympic sports" at the college level could be administered by the national sports organization for that sport (with a large increase in funding over what they have now, with the money coming from the participating schools). Each sport could have its own set of rules and the one-size-for-all rules of the NCAA would be unnecessary. The U.S. Soccer Federation could administer college soccer and run its championship tournaments. USA Swimming could administer college swimming, USA Gymnastics runs college gymnastics, USA Hockey runs college ice hockey, etc., etc.