“It’s all about control,” says Don Jackson, a lawyer who specializes in representing athletes who have run afoul of the N.C.A.A. Teenage athletes with agents are far more likely to make informed decisions about their lives than athletes acting on their own. Instead, athletes have to rely on coaches and athletic administrators, whose primary interest is the school, not the player.

And it’s not just hockey players who have to make important life decisions at a young age. When a baseball player gets drafted out of high school, he has a hard decision to make. Basketball players are usually eligible for the draft after one year of college; football players after three years. Yet N.C.A.A. rules force these athletes to make these major decisions without an agent at their side.

Why is hockey different? It is certainly not because the rules themselves are different for hockey players. Stacey Osburn, a spokeswoman for the N.C.A.A., said in an e-mail that the rules are the same for athletes in all sports. It is not against the rules for an athlete to talk to an agent. But when that agent contacts a professional team on behalf of a hockey player, he is violating N.C.A.A. rules. When he steers an athlete to a particular school, he is violating N.C.A.A. rules. And when his free advice is aimed at landing him a paying client, he is violating the rules.

It is only because the use of agents is so ingrained in hockey culture that the N.C.A.A. has chosen to look the other way. What it ought to do instead is adopt hockey’s system for all its athletes in all its sports, giving them the same benefit — the counsel of an experienced advocate — that hockey players have.

To do so, though, would require actually caring about the welfare of the athletes who play the games and make everyone else millions of dollars. Which is precisely why it will never happen.