The NCAA, in present form, is finished.

More and more, as I read what's going on in a number of fronts with respect to "college sports", one inescapable conclusion comes up again and again.

The entire concept of an amateur NCAA for athletes who are actually students at the universities they represent and play for is, for the top schools and the top sports, an archaic concept which is about to go the way of the dodo bird.

In short, there will be major changes, and probably frighteningly soon.

There are already several developments which point to this end.

First:  Two major developments against the NCAA have been made in concert with a continuing court case which could dissolve the NCAA and bankrupt it completely.

A couple of weeks ago, EA Sports, the evil conglomerate who basically has had control of college and professional football video game licenses for a long time now, could no longer license the NCAA Football game -- in fact, the court in which the case I will reference in a second is being held told EA Sports that they could not, in any way, use the likenesses of current athletes.

This basically meant that EA had to talk fast to even get this year's (the final edition with the NCAA logo -- and what I honestly believe may well be the final year of the NCAA entirely!!) edition out.

The other development came Thursday.

The NCAA will no longer, on their website, sell jerseys.  It, in fact, will no longer sell ANY college or university merchandise:

"Moving forward, the NCAA online shop will no longer offer college and university merchandise," [Mark] Lewis [the NCAA executive vice president for alliances and championships] said. "In the coming days, the store's website will be shut down temporarily and reopen in a few weeks as a marketplace for NCAA championship merchandise only. After becoming aware of issues with the site, we determined the core function of the NCAA.com fan shop should not be to offer merchandise licensed by our member schools."

It is obvious that they are about to lose what probably will be a bankrupting verdict in the mushrooming Ed O'Bannon (and an increasing number of others') lawsuit, in which O'Bannon claims that the money made by the NCAA was done on the likenesses of the players, who got nothing for it.

It now appears that the players will win.

This almost certainly, at least in my honest opinion, will bankrupt the NCAA, and the NCAA will die within one year, maybe two.  The current timeline for the trial has the trial starting July 9, 2014.

What could easily happen could make a football-less autumn at many colleges a reality.

It's certain, by the current tea leaves (including and especially the admission by the NCAA Thursday that the sale of individual and school jerseys was a "mistake"), that the players will win, perhaps, billions, with the only limit being the statute of limitations and how much money could feasibly be awarded by this lawsuit to all the different athletes in all the different schools in all the different sports in which the NCAA will (certainly) be found liable as to illegally making money where the law says it should not have.

You could have a situation that, come August or September, sans appeals processes, the NCAA (by being forced to liquidate) could simply cease to exist, leaving no sanctioning body (and, hence, no organizational process at all) for the continuance of college sports, even football.

And then you get to the formalization of something that, at least for football, I've been calling for for years.

The college presidents of the five remaining "power conferences" (Big XII, Big Ten, Pac-12, ACC, and SEC) are formally lining up proposals for the creation of what is informally being called (in the wrong direction, I might add) "Division IV".

This would finally, once and for all, codify what the five conferences have intended to do with the BCS the whole time -- separate themselves from their lessers and basically enforce that those five conferences play a completely different brand and level of sport (especially football) than anyone else.

To me, this would be the creation of what I would call "FBS-I" and "FBS-II".

All the current rules for inclusion into the Football Bowl Subdivision would stay, but now you would have the freedom to change those rules for simply the 62 schools in the 5 "FBS-I" conferences and Notre Dame.

Those 63 schools would be taken off and there would be no material interchange between them and the current "non-AQ" schools.

Most people believe this will take place in the next year.

But will the O'Bannon case render this all moot?

I've always said, and I do agree that reclassification is probably a good first step, basically codifying what is long-believed:  that schools, conferences, and schedules outside the "power conferences" have no place at the major table.

A quick re-classification would probably result, many believe, from a settlement where the NCAA is forced to allow the athletes to share the profits.

But what happens if the O'Bannon case goes to trial and bankrupts the NCAA?

First, the lower divisions probably get absorbed back into the NAIA (the National Association for Intercollegiate Athletics), which would probably have to create divisions for them.

Second, you'd probably end up with a BCS-like coalition of conferences and colleges, in which college presidents and ADs effectively, in concert with media like ESPN and FOX Sports 1 and NBC Sports Network (etc.), would run the show.

In football, it would change little.  The only real question is whether the transition might make it very difficult to have a meaningful season, say, in 2014, if it becomes clear that the NCAA is bankrupt and cannot feasibly administer college sports at all.  Even under appeal of the O'Bannon case, could the NCAA lose the last real power it is perceived to have over schools, especially the likes of the SEC football powers?

Eventually, you'd have at least one coalition of the five conferences and Notre Dame and the current College Football Playoff would probably go (once the transition is complete) roughly to schedule.

In basketball, that little thing you call March Madness would disintegrate instantly.  You would literally have made-for-TV events in it's place, and forget the Florida Gulf Coasts or Butlers or the like even sniffing it.  One might say the only thing the NCAA realistically has left IS the March Madness tournament.

If you create an "FBS-I"-like model for basketball, forget about having to wonder if Florida Gulf Coast would make a hypothetical New March Madness -- they wouldn't even be that classification of school.  They, and this is if the schools of this size could have a meaningful tournament that more than three people outside the schools would want to watch (which see the current CBI or CollegeInsider.com tournaments -- yes, there are, in fact, TWO post-season tournaments BELOW the NIT!!!), would basically have to create their own coalition/agreement, not to say that one of the two aforementioned tournaments would not provide a "national championship" for such lesser schools and conferences.

(To give you an idea of how bad this goes, there were actually two "power conference" teams in the third-level CBI.  Both had losing overall records:  Purdue was 15-17, eliminated in the second round by eventual winner Santa Clara -- and Texas was 16-17, losing in the first round to Houston.  AXS TV, a mens' interest/sporting channel, had the bulk of the games, including the three-game championship series.  No "power conference" teams played in the CollegeInsider.com tournament.)

So I will say that there is a very real possibility that you might be seeing the last (or second-to-last) March Madness tournament in 2014.

And I think it's clear that most people concede that's where we're going.

But that brings another part to the question:  If the courts rule the athletes entitled to such benefits, does this not take them out of being students entirely, making them employees of the university?  This has taxation possibilities written all over it.