The 5 biggest threats to the NCAA’s existence

1. The Power Five

Depending on the way the next few years play out this move may be etched onto the NCAA’s tombstone. The NCAA board of directors voted 16-2 last Thursday to give the Power Five — the five richest conferences, 64 teams plus Notre Dame — the “autonomy” to create some of their own rules.

The schools still cannot pay athletes. But they can give athletes cost-of-attendance stipends, insurance benefits, full-cost and four-year scholarships in addition to now being allowed to self-determine how to regulate recruiting, staff sizes and how many hours per week a player can spend on their sport.

Other conferences have the option to adopt the rules the Power Five will put in place, but many will not be able to afford it.

This could have a profound impact in a number of ways. The NCAA touts this as what will save Division I football, but it could just as easily destroy the NCAA’s place in it.

For one, the gap between the ‘Have’s’ and the ‘Have-Not’s’ just grew substantially. Here’s the issue: to be an NCAA Division I program you are required to run at least 14 sports programs — and Title IX mandates equal opportunities be given to men’s and women’s sports, so at least seven men’s and seven women’s programs —  of which, two, maybe three at best, will turn a profit. Now, one of your only profitable programs just became more expensive because the Power Five just passed new rules and you can either adopt them and shell out for the new benefits or fall even further behind.

Already there have been intimations that some of the mid-majors affected by this could just opt to strike out and attempt to make their own league — away from the restrictive regulation of the NCAA.

Then there are the Power Five. The old adage that ‘if you give an inch, they take a mile’ could certainly hold true here. How long before the 65 schools — the first-class citizens of Division I — decide making their own rules suits them just fine and the only thing holding them back is the NCAA itself?

What’s to stop the Power Five from seceding the next time the TV contracts come up for negotiation? Wouldn’t it be far more profitable to create your own league, regulate it yourself, and maybe even be able to avoid getting caught up in what is essentially a tired labor debate by just paying the athletes a little bit? Steve Spurrier already supports it. Mack Brown supported it at Texas. The National Labor Relations Board has already ruled that football players are basically employees.

What’s stopping them? The NCAA.

Eventually, it’s not unreasonable to think that the Power Five will realize that they can collude on their own and don’t need the NCAA’s oversight — or the NCAA skimming off the top — to ensure business continues to be profitable.

For all the talk about competitive balance and protecting amateurism, ceding more autonomy to its most profitable members undermines both and shows that, more than anything, the NCAA is just desperate to survive.

It also may have just inadvertently showed that college athletics — especially at their highest levels — could potentially exist without the NCAA altogether.

By the time the next round of TV contracts come up for negotiation — we’ll know.