College football moves from communism to capitalism overnight, chaos ensues

Fox News Flash top headlines are here. Check out what's clicking on Foxnews.com.

As fans gleefully dissect the public attacks being levied by Alabama’s Nick Saban to Texas A&M’s Jimbo Fisher and vice versa, the larger context of their college athletics battle is being lost. Saban vs. Fisher, while wildly entertaining, isn’t just a personal feud, it’s symptomatic of the massive changes that have been wrought in college football in the space of only a couple of years.

Without most realizing it, college sports have moved from Communism to capitalism. This is the dynamic undergirding virtually everything you’re seeing happen in college sports right now. We’ve seen a fundamental paradigm shift in college athletic governance, moving from Communism to nearly unfettered capitalism. That has massive consequences for all the stakeholders in college sports — the players, the coaches, the fans, and the schools.

Now let me explain what I mean when I say we’ve moved from communism to capitalism: for its entire history, or at least since the NCAA’s founding, college sports have operated under the principles of communism. A relative handful of people — coaches, administrators, NCAA bureaucrats, and state university athletic departments — became very wealthy, while the vast majority of the valuable labor producing the value — the players — worked for well below market rates. The NCAA was, essentially, the Berlin Wall, keeping everyone in college athletics, at least to a large degree, behind the Iron Curtain, hidden from the free markets of capitalism.

CLICK HERE FOR MORE SPORTS COVERAGE ON FOXNEWS.COM

Head Coach Jimbo Fisher of the Texas A&M Aggies talks at midfield with Head Coach Nick Saban of the Alabama Crimson Tide at