The NFL has been so hands off of CFB because the old system benefited them. Players were desperate to get to the NFL, but by the NFLs own collective bargaining agreements, players were ineligible until 3 years removed from college. That created a pseudo farm system where the schools took all of the risks, as well as profits, but passed along a mostly ready replacement workforce. Like it or not, they discard older and ineffective players in exchange for this new group each year. Those discarded players can’t go back to college, maybe can move on to a lesser league where salaries are about the same as an entry level blue collar job.
where the NFL will start to get concerned, is when their new talent pool dwindles because “college” teams will pay a higher amount to keep players on their roster. Years of eligibility get extended because it could be ruled unfair to limit someone to 4-5 if they are also working towards a degree, which sounds stupid because it’s mostly no longer about academics, but I could see a case being made by a Duke, Rice, Vanderbilt, etc player.
I hate this new world. I have renamed my work’s “College FB Smack talk” MS Teams chat to “Young Professionals that play on a College campus smack talk”