I was a college athlete back in the day, and my athletic department tried to do something similar -- they would make shell accounts controlled by athletics/ncaa compliance and try to friend whole teams. We got around it by having a shared block list of the shells. If I recall correctly, we had 20 at a given time.

But, our team was small (30 people), and not in the "money sports" (football, basketball, baseball), so we could get away with this. Larger teams in higher profile sports won't be able to do this.