After the FBI arrested several assistant coaches, shoe company representatives, and agents in September of last year on charges that included bribery and fraud, the world of collegiate athletics watched and waited for the next episode in the inevitable reckoning of amateur sports. This past week, leaked documents and wiretaps from the FBI’s ongoing investigation answered the blood-thirsty call for more and bigger names to fall. Arizona coach Sean Miller and players Miles Bridges, Wendell Carter, and many others were implicated in violations ranging from the career-threatening (in the case of Miller) to the barely-mentionable (Bridges and Carter will continue to play). Judging from the breadth of these two waves of allegations and the ominous declarations of the lead prosecutor last fall, this saga is far from over. Where it ends is unclear, but the tentacles of this investigation are sure to turn up the darkness in every corner of an enduringly corrupt NCAA.

The short-term outlook for the NCAA as an organization is certainly bleak, and the jaded upkeep of an imbalanced amateurism is waning fast. Players, especially in the upper echelon of college basketball and football, are being paid, and the current system only rewards those who are best at maintaining the fraudulent facade of fairness. All the while, high school athletes are being leveraged by sports agencies and shoe brands who further exploit a system that simultaneously makes billions of dollars and denies the influence of money among its highly competitive ranks. In essence, cheating coaches and corrupt businesses are the winners, the NCAA is wealthily indifferent, and only the very best players in the most popular sports see a single dime of their toils beyond the ambiguous promise of an education.

The simple answer in the way of reform is either to pay players or allow them to entirely bypass the NCAA’s exploitative ways. Both options are sure to have unintended consequences that reverberate into the lives of the vast majority of student-athletes who are just that, students and athletes. The latter solution is in the hands of the NFL and NBA, who have all but enlisted the NCAA as their de facto minor leagues. Both oft-proposed solutions are growing imminent as the illusory amateurism of collegiate athletics fades and the spectating public grows increasingly aware of the corruption underlying the competition on the court, field, and on their TV screens.

Exactly what collegiate athletics will look like is anyone’s guess, and the answer is likely some hybrid of player compensation and the current student-athlete model. As long as the spirit of competition remains in amateur athletics, there are bound to be cheaters and occasional bribes which infiltrate an otherwise clean arena, so the legislative abilities of a governmental body like the NCAA will always be limited in this regard. But equally important to protecting institutional integrity is providing players with proper protection from the swarm of leeches—coaches, shoe companies, and agents—who want nothing more but a slice of the lucrative pie that accompanies the potential of the star high school athlete.

This is my hope for the future of the college athlete: that the NCAA be wiped of its corruptive actors and that the athlete be free to use his or her singular talents and painstaking efforts to acquire the opportunity for a higher education without sacrificing the financial fruits of their labor and without undue pressure from talentless parasites. The college athlete should have total control of himself or herself. The FBI probe is the first genuine leap toward this better future.