Nicole Auerbach

USA TODAY Sports

We get it, Mark Emmert.

You're the president of the NCAA so you don’t want any college athlete to be paid anything. You don’t want athletes who represent their countries on the world's biggest stage to get money from their national governing bodies for winning Olympic medals. You're more comfortable with someone like Texas swimmer Joseph Schooling — who earned $740,000 under Singapore's National Olympic Council awards program for his phenomenal 100 butterfly gold medal-winning swim that beat Michael Phelps — pocketing zero dollars.

We get it.

And here's what you and the NCAA don't get: We don’t mind them getting the money. If there's a system in place to compensate Olympic athletes, a system that the NCAA's Division I schools approved and adopted back in 2001, then they should be compensated just like their professional peers.

Mark Emmert says NCAA might rethink Olympic payouts to student-athletes

After an enforcement scandal at Miami and perceived overplay of its powers at Penn State, the NCAA recently has avoided making itself look bad — even going so far as to make moves to improve college athletes' well-being. But this shows that the NCAA just can't leave well enough alone in some cases, and might be incapable of being likeable.

On Thursday during an appearance at the Aspen Institute, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank, Emmert said the reasoning behind the rule was that it's fine for athletes to win $25,000 one time in an academic career, but that amounts far greater than that — like Schooling’s reward from Singapore — is “a complexity” and something that is “causing everybody to go, ‘Oh, well, that’s not really what we were thinking about.’ ” Emmert then suggested that the NCAA membership will address this “complexity” and perhaps change it.

There's no need. The money is coming from outside sources, not the NCAA or individual universities or media rights holders. Amateurism — the bedrock of the college athletic model — can still be preserved.

But creating an arbitrary cutoff point for how much income an athlete can receive for something not tied to the NCAA is fundamentally unfair. Pretty soon, the NCAA is going to come after Katie Ledecky; after all, the 19-year-old swimming superstar won four gold and one silver medals in Rio, which allowed her to pocket $115,000. Is that also too much? Or because the United States doled out the cash, it’s OK?

These questions need not even be raised. The issue should be moot, because the NCAA has had a rule in place for 15 years that allows for these extraordinary athletes to accept cash bonuses for extraordinary accomplishments.

Let's leave it at that.