good thing economic and academic scholarships also exist. there’s an absolutely tiny number of athletic scholarships and athletes compared to the total student body in every single university. removing the athletic scholarships and athletes will only hurt the athletes and not help anyone else.

There's the context of opportunity cost. If you use money to give an athletic scholarship, you can't use this money for something else. Hence, if the athletic scholarships were replaced by other types of scholarships, it would help those others.