I'm thinking Kansas might be having another thought process contrary to this right about now
Kansas could get the death penalty and in five years they'd be Kansas again. The NCAA is powerless to harm a program below their baseline. If a program is built on a base of tradition and loyal fan support it will always recover.
That's a big part of where the inaccurate perception that the NCAA won't punish big time schools comes from. Kentucky got the death penalty in 1952, and won a national title 5 years later. They had a two-year tournament ban, a ban from being shown on television, and scholarship reductions in 1989 and were in the Final Four four years later.
UNLV, SMU, houses of cards like that built on no foundation, yeah, they're done when they get caught. Auburn basketball will go back to being Auburn basketball when the heat catches up to Pearl again. But who cares? Auburn knows that they're getting while the getting is good, their eyes are wide open.
To tie it back to my previous comment, there's nothing the NCAA could do to harm Illinois that would come even close to the things Illinois has done to harm itself in the recent past. We have no reason to be afraid of them at all, nor any moral reason to respect or obey their crooked rules with respect to player compensation.
Now, there's a level to which we probably shouldn't stoop in the already unseemly world of keeping players academically eligible, and we should have a stringent lack of tolerance for player violence and criminality which would create an unsafe environment for the campus community. But those are separate issues that should not be conflated.