Not quite; a lot has changed since the 30's. The NFL was really not that big a deal until the 1960's with players routinely having to work second jobs in the off season to earn a decent living. The average salary in the 50s was about $75K in today's dollars and a lot of guys made less. Star player salaries in the league in the mid-60's translate to about $500K into today's dollars. If you weren't a star, you weren't getting close to that. Before that it was worse, and it was not uncommon for NFL teams to draft a guy only to see him pass on the opportunity and pursue a career in the field he studied in college. A football scholarship was actually a good deal for a player because he was trading four years of football for an opportunity to get an education that would put him a career that would pay far more and leave him far less physically damaged than the NFL. Things stated to change when the AFL started to compete with the NFL for stars by offering them more money and then the player strikes of the early 80's. Increased interest by the networks, partly fuel by the establishment of Fox in 1986, and growth of cable created the TV rights bonanza and salary explosion we see today.
The situation we see with colleges getting massive payouts is also a creature of the last 40 years and not the way things have always been. For years, the NCAA controlled all national television rights and intentionally limited the number of games so as to not hurt in person attendance (different times, indeed). The money they got, which wasn't much by today's standards, was evenly distributed to all member schools after the NCAA took its cut. At that point, the revenue sources for the programs were primarily the gate, radio broadcast rights, and donors. The CFA formed in 1977 by the top conferences and independents to give them control of the TV rights. What we see today in revenue is a product of a Supreme Court ruling in June 1984 that ended the NCAA's control of TV rights for all member programs and the cable TV explosion with opened the financial firehose.
All of this is very well documented and readily available on-line and in numerous books. It's not a matter of opinion, it's just historical facts.