Conservatives are fond of repeating Schumpeter’s gale. Capitalism is an evolutionary process of continuous innovation and creative destruction. I doubt many of the talking heads who say it have any idea what it means, but that’s another story. The thing is, capitalism is just destructive sometimes. That comes to mind when looking at what’s going on with college football. It is a multi-billion dollar sport determined to blow itself apart. The looming civil war between the big budget programs and the rest of college sports is going to get ugly.

At least one college football coach isn’t happy about the SEC threatening to take their ball and leave if the Power Five conferences aren’t granted autonomy by the NCAA.

Central Florida coach George O’Leary, in fact, put a historical spin on SEC commissioner Mike Slive’s threat of forming a “Division IV” if the league — along with the ACC, Big 12, Big Ten and the Pac-12 — don’t get the flexibility needed to create their own bylaws.

“They sound like the South during the Civil War,” O’Leary told the Orlando Sentinel earlier this week. “If they don’t get their way, they’re going to secede and start their own country. … I think college football is in real trouble.”

I’ve always wondered why the rest of the college sports world tolerates the SEC. The casual disregard for the rules by these schools is not new. They were cheating since the founding of the NCAA. It’s like the league attracts sociopaths. I bet 80% of the rules are the result of an SEC scandal.

Smaller Division I schools likely can’t afford the changes that the SEC and the major conferences are seeking. And while Division II and Division III have their own rules, forming a Division IV would seemingly create a wider divide between the Power Five and other smaller schools.

“They’re trying to go the other way and create an even wider gap between the haves and have-nots,” O’Leary told the Sentinel of the Power Five and the SEC’s threats. “I think some of these schools have forgotten where they came from.”

The SEC wants the NCAA steering committee to adopt its proposal for the voting threshold, which would allow the Power Five to pass legislation with more ease.

My assumption is the men running college sports are savvy operators. This attempt to starve out the smaller programs is the sort of thing you do when the pie is no longer growing. Maybe they see trouble coming over the horizon for their business and are taking step to insulate themselves from it. On the other hand, maybe they are just greedy and about to blow up their industry. All sports have become so greedy and short sighted, it is hard not to look at them like cannibals in a war of man against man.