Sorry, Synaesthesia (yeah I had to look it up) but if you put a cap on what the school can spend, then they will simply pay the coaches $1 each and the boosters will pay them $20 million to do a weekly talk on TV/radio/podcast. The players will be loose cannons no matter what. It's a money chase; get used to it. That's why conference membership must be a long-duration leap of faith, an actual bond vs a temporary business arrangement. Do we have that in The ACC? Would you say that they have it in The SEC, B1G?
My biggest objection to your idea is that you think ESPN should have anything to do with the structure or regulation of these matters. They are Public Enemy No. 1 in my eyes when it comes to college football operating in its own interests. They have crippled the ACC by (pick one) persuading/manipulating/bribing John Swofford into a long-term media contract and adding members that the conference would otherwise never have added. But, hey, it works for ESPN. And when it becomes opportune for ESPN to relocate some of these schools they will set about doing it. Stay tuned and watch.
My vision is a for-profit business, owned by the member schools and operated by the next generation of Jim Delany's (College Athletics Alliance?) . There are currently around 360 Division I schools in the NCAA. I think they could all thrive in the CAA. They would have the opportunity to reconfigure themselves into conferences without the interference of ESPN. Imagine this: Cincinnati, Louisville, Pittsburgh, West Virginia, Syracuse, Boston College, Virginia Tech, Georgia Tech. Look familiar? Would that be a great conference? There need not be a ranking system akin to P5, G5, FCS. The conferences would eventually settle into a pecking order, probably based on their attractiveness to media companies.
NIL and pay for play will be a grimy business which could be handled best by this company centrally rather than by hundreds of different offices at the schools, a central point for scheduling games, travel, officials and officiating standards, etc.
Media companies, especially ESPN, would have their role limited to bidding for content from the conferences, as they are, rather than rearranging the schools to their liking. Negotiating media deals could be outsourced to the CAA professionals and remove that burden from the conferences. With an organization this large, is it out of the question that they might form a member-owned TV network to broadcast their own content along with high school games and sports news, recruiting profiles, etc. The NCAA disallowed High School coverage by the Longhorn Network, but the NCAA would be out of the picture.
Apply your imagination to the endless lines of business that could be taken-up by a profit-driven "Alliance."