Just thinking out loud here:
The NCAA was powerless over NIL before they admitted it. This just means that they publicly acknowledge their predicament. IOW, dropping all NIL investigations doesn't really change much.
It's not that the guardrails have been removed....they were never there in the first place.
Next move? Scholarships become a lot less meaningful. What I mean is this: It costs an in-state student about $35K a year to attend the University of Alabama. For out of state, it's about $52K. While I think a lot of the NIL numbers we hear are greatly inflated, even if the truth is half of that, cost of attendance is a burp in a hurricane for the NIL package.
"Son, we're out of scholarships. But that doesn't matter. We can give you an NIL package worth $500K a year. You can pay for tuition, room and board out of that, play on a team with a chance to win championships, and get ready for The Show."
So you effectively have the total roster limit as your cap on "scholarships." The total roster limit used to be 105, though I confess I haven't kept up with the current cap.
Yes, I know the NCAA has ostensible jurisdiction over who specifically counts against the old limit of 85. Putting on my best lawyer cap, "You're telling me that even though my client receives no aid from the University, he can't walk on like any other student, be on the team (and therefore earn his NIL money) precisely because he's good enough to get playing time?" One more defeat for NCAA governance.
Best case is that a collective bargaining agreement brings some consistency and sanity to the situation. Yes, that means a players' union and a management committee. And how you address "outside income" would be interesting. IOW, a member of the UAW can earn money from activities outside of building cars. Why can't a member of the players' union earn money from stuff outside of athletics? But I think we could get there, especially regarding the transfer portal.
Given that there aren't (and really never were) limits on NIL, the portal strikes me as the major hurdle. It also strikes me as something the collective bargaining agreement could effectively address. The NFL does, so why couldn't college?
Worst case is that fans get fed up and stop opening checkbooks. That has some nasty downstream implications rippling far beyond big time football and basketball. If they don't exist, or no longer gin the income they currently do, every single collegiate athletic department becomes a huge cash drain -- and the consequences will affect some highly politically sensitive constituencies.
A lot of so-called Olympic sports would get reduced or eliminated altogether because they can't sustain themselves financially. So a lot of tennis, golf, swimming, softball, crew, soccer, etc. athletes lose scholarships. And at least half of them will be women.
Additionally, without the big paydays from playing "buy a win" games against the elite teams, smaller college football dries up. Now you have dozens of G-5 and lesser programs out of business and thousands of formerly scholarshipped athletes out of financial aid. Many of them the very minorities that the whole concept has been promoted to help.
So I don't think the NCAA dropping all pretense of governance is that big a deal. They haven't had the ability to govern anything since SCOTUS ruled 9-0 on the O'Bannon case. This just accelerates the end game.
What that end game is will be fascinating to watch.