Oh, no! Money!

 You gotta feel a bit for Nick Saban and his coaching brethren. Everything they know, and have always taken granted, just got turned inside-out like a pair of pants pockets.

College athletes are going to make bank now!

All over America football and basketball players are syncing up with branding folks, signing endorsement deals, changing the balance of power between player and coach (or so the doom-and-gloom crowd is telling us.) There may be no "I" in "team," but there sure as hell is in "income."

It's a madhouse! A madhouse, I tell you!

Which is not what Saban and his bros are saying, mind you. But you know there's a little voice in all their heads screaming it.

 Outwardly they may sound quite reasonable and go-with-the-flow, but inwardly the Titanic is sinking and they're shoving the women and children aside to get at the lifeboats. And every once in awhile you can catch a whiff of that sentiment.

And so here the other day was Saban, who makes north of $9 mill a year, marveling at the fact his heir apparent quarterback, Bryce Young, is already approaching a million in endorsements even though he's barely played. Although "marveling" probably isn't the right word.

The Blob suspects it wasn't. Just like it suspects Saban was as much issuing a warning as making an observation when he said certain players were going to command more in endorsement dollars than others.

"Everything that we've done in college athletics in the past has been equal," Saban said at the SEC Media Day. "Everybody's had equal scholarship, equal opportunity. Now that's probably not going to be the case. Some positions, some players, will have more opportunities than others."

Well, yes, that's the way capitalism works. And high-end college football and basketball have been capitalist enterprises for a long time, operating by have-and-have-not capitalist principles while expending great stores of energy presenting an old-college-try false front.

If it were all as amateur as they tried to make out, after all, Nick Saban would not be making that $9-mill-plus a year to coach football.

Truth is, opportunity in college athletics at Saban's level has never been equal, nor anything like it. Coaches became wealthy beyond measure; the "student-athlete" got dinged for selling their bowl swag -- bowl swag the NCAA said was theirs -- for a few extra bucks. And you think Trevor Lawrence didn't get more ink/exposure/face time than the lugs up front who kept the edge rushers off him?

So, yes, quarterbacks and wide receivers and running backs are going to make more off endorsements than the offensive linemen. And if back of that acknowledgment by Saban you can detect some unease about what that will do to team unity ... well, I don't see any rending of team unity in Tampa Bay, where Tom Brady is the face of the franchise.

"But Mr. Blob," you're saying. "Those guys are older. And they're pros."

True. But the kids at Alabama or Clemson or Ohio State are pros, too, in everything but name, and have been for a long time. So I have a feeling they know how this all works better than we think they do. And if the coach-player dynamic will undoubtedly change now on the college level, it's unlikely it will be detectable.

I mean, Coach is still Coach, and no one on his roster is going to be making more than he does. He'll still command the same authority -- just as, in the NFL, Bruce Arians commands authority in the Tampa Bay locker room, and Andy Reid does in Kansas City's, Bill Belichick in New England's, and Sean Payton in New Orleans's.

And a lot of those guys don't pull down anywhere near the coin some of their players do.

The sky is not falling, in other words. It just looks a little different now.