ADVANTAGE, COLD SPRING SHOPS.

How long have I been carrying on about College Sports, Inc. realigning until there are four major conferences of sixteen teams each and the National Collegiate Athletic Association becomes irrelevant?

It's dawning on current association president Charlie Baker, call sign Charlie Baker.

“The courts and other public entities continue to debate reform measures that in many cases would seriously damage parts or all of college athletics,” Baker said in a letter to leaders in Division I, the NCAA’s highest competitive level. “Therefore, it is time for us—the NCAA—to offer our own forward-looking framework.”

The plan Baker laid out after months of study would allow all Division I institutions to directly compensate athletes for use of their name, image and likeness.

Why, it's as if it's the end of the association as we know it.

It would also create a new subdivision for the richest and most powerful programs that would give them significantly more autonomy over how they spent their money, as long as they agree to “invest at least $30,000 per year into an enhanced educational trust fund for at least half” of their athletes.

Sportswriters and commentators described Baker’s plan as “groundbreaking” and “revolutionary,” and in certain ways it would be. It would pierce a historical barrier, self-imposed by the NCAA, that has prevented colleges from paying athletes directly over and above the costs of their educations.

And it would acknowledge the long-standing thirst of the association’s 40 to 60 most powerful football-playing members for more control over their own fates, separating them more formally from the 200 to 300 other institutions that also compete in Division I basketball, and even from the rest of the 130-odd universities that currently play in the Football Bowl Subdivision.

Let's see, "40 to 60" gets us pretty close to 64, doesn't it, and the current bowl structure requires about seventy teams to put mayonnaise company logos on special jerseys, doesn't it?

But it is also clearly a nod to the reality that the NCAA is hanging on to its authority over college sports by a thread: an attempt both to discourage Congress and the courts from undermining its authority further, and to deter the biggest programs from walking away from the NCAA altogether and forming their own freestanding association.

“What Ross calls ‘revolutionary,’ I call belated and reactionary,” Marc Edelman, a professor of law at Baruch College, said in response to a characterization of Baker’s proposal by Yahoo’s Ross Dellenger. “This association, the #NCAA, ignores experts in the field and does nothing to promote reform until their backs are legally against the wall. Right now, their backs are legally against the wall and Baker knows it.”

Karen Weaver, an adjunct assistant professor at the University of Pennsylvania who writes widely about college athletics, described Baker’s proposal as “a way to keep the organization together under the NCAA umbrella … while giving enormous flexibility and almost unchecked spending to the highest-profile schools.”

There's not much new there, either, in part the football format we have now is the consequence of the trustees at Notre Dame and the regents at Oklahoma wanting out of what they argued were restraints of trade, because at the time their dominant strategy was to defect from the restraint.