I think by now that we can agree, or at the very least see, that student-athletes are about to get paid. In some way, shape for form, the transaction seems imminent. It could be a stipend — the sort of thing West Virginia has been exploring for more than two years — or it could be a payout from broadcast rights revenue that now goes to the NCAA and its membership.

Or it could be both.

I’ve been watching and worrying about this for a while because, as explained in the link above, there is a risk to the reward if the reward is compensation. Everyone would be getting paid, but the group of “everyone” could shrink, either severely or gradually, but almost inevitably.

What happens if all those schools and all the others, whether well-off or not, have to pay their student-athletes an additional sum of money? What if any school develops a spending conscience? You could very easily see schools drop sports, which was already happening across the country, and the most vulnerable ones are the ones that are least protected.

That affects student-athletes who don’t fill the stands, and probably never intended to since cross country and rowing and the like aren’t popular spectator sports and the appeal of golf and gymnastics and swimming and diving varies from place to place.

It seems to be a severe side-effect of a decision aimed at compensating football and basketball players for the time they spend on their sport and the money they make their universities. None of that even accounts for the Title IX implications or the possibility the NCAA may one day sense the pinch upon its members and mandate only a dozen Division I sports, the latter seeming possible now as a way to grant schools in the major conferences greater autonomy within the NCAA as opposed to independence outside of it.

That’s old, something we’ve covered before here, but there’s always something new. We’re about to witness another watershed moment for the NCAA. The almost-5-year-old Ed O’Bannon lawsuit begins Monday. Almost no one believes the NCAA will win, never mind get away scot free — the writing has been on the wall for a while and the walls are closing on now. The plaintiff seeks around half of the broadcast rights revenue, and the NCAA flinches at that figure, or any figure close to it, because of what it says that money generally does.

The NCAA states and believes the money the football and men’s basketball contracts generate makes it possible for smaller sports to exist. It is the governing body’s argument that the court would be wrong to make the NCAA share the money with participants because the NCAA would then be unable to fund the little guys.

It’s not a terrible point — I think it’s petty, but I can see the principle — and it’s what the NCAA is leaning on here.

Except that the judge has called shenanigans. She doesn’t buy that line, doesn’t think the NCAA can stand behind a rule it made, doesn’t see why the NCAA can’t make another rule, doesn’t see why the NCAA can’t have more stringent revenue sharing and wiser spending.

That is an enormous and, frankly, unpublicized angle here. It’s setting the table for an outcome in which the NCAA has to do business different — and who, including the NCAA with all its recent relenting, thinks the model doesn’t need changed?

You see where this could be going. Look, the money is always going to be there for football and men’s basketball — and it’s always going to be required by those teams, too — so if there’s only so much excess to spread, you know where the spread will be the thinnest before it’s not present at all.

Take WVU as an example: In the 2012-13 equity report, baseball showed expenses in excess of $1.5 million. Revenue was just above $500,000. Women’s basketball? Try $3.4 million in expenses and $1.5 in revenue. Men’s and women’s soccer combined? That’d be $2.4 million in expenses and $490,000 in revenue.

Football has $16.1 million in expenses and $27 million in revenue. Men’s basketball had $7.4 million in expenses and $6.6 in revenue.

So what happens if WVU has less money to support baseball or men’s soccer, never mind the two teams that usually drive the athletic department?

You see the point the NCAA is trying to make. Schools need the money in question so they can create and enhance opportunities for all student-athletes. The judge just isn’t allowing it, and the argument there is the NCAA can’t be allowed to stand behind a rule it created when it can simply make better rules. The judge sees no reason the NCAA and its membership can’t come up with shrewder revenue-sharing rules and spend wiser than it does with schools and leagues obsessed with supporting football and men’s basketball with salaries, facilities, recruiting budgets and such luxuries.

By the time things get started next week and before it all ends, the NCAA has to prove there’s nothing wrong with the way it conducts its business, which seems like an impossibly tall task in the presence of opinions and even admissions that its system is unfair.

What seems like a greater concern, though, is how new revenue sharing and tighter spending changes what we once knew.