I’ll admit, there’s plenty to digest in my column in today’s paper.

To review, WVU figured out the difference between the total cost of attendance and the total value of a scholarship. That number would be the stipend WVU would pay players on top of their scholarship if the NCAA and its members approve that idea.

Naturally, the value of that stipend would differ from one school to another, which seems like a way around a flat fee and antitrust claims, and that variable would then become part of our ever-evolving recruiting landscape.

WVU also figured out what a student-athlete on a full scholarship would have to report on a tax return. If athletic departments are finally revealed to be businesses and student-athletes are deemed employees, if schools start chipping off money from jersey sales, then it stands to reasons the IRS would probably become interested in tax filings.

What you’ll find interesting about WVU’s discovery there is that the number is pretty significant, but not as massive as many reactionary labor ruling reports suggested. And it wouldn’t really vary much from one school to another.

Those are big items, but there are bigger things afoot.

It goes on from there, and you have to wonder how much schools will extend themselves if they have to pay stipends. WVU has 17 sports and 400 or so student athletes. The stipend bill would be hefty. And it would be larger at schools with more sports.

North Carolina has 26 sports and had a total revenue of less than $10,000 last year. Stanford has 36 sports, because it’s a titan, but still cleared just above $2 million.

Certainly the future of sports or the quality of the support and funding some sports receive becomes a part of the conversation. You have to have 16 sports to be a Division I school, but you don’t have to have 10 or 20 or even one or two more than that. Just 16.

And to me, that’s interesting because we’re seeing the NCAA relent a little bit. The $2,000 stipend from the fall of 2011 was one move, and there was writing on the wall before the decision to feed walk-ons and scholarship athletes all they can eat.

If the world keeps changing and the finances keep evolving, there really is nothing to stop the NCAA from saying, “Hey, instead of 16, why not, I don’t know, 12?” The truth is there’s really nothing to stop a lot of changes. And it just feels inevitable that we’re going to see a lot of changes, and ones that might make it easier for schools to thrive, or even to survive.

To continue this hypothetical, lowering the limit of Division I sports wouldn’t necessarily benefit just the big schools so they can cash bigger revenue checks. It would help smaller schools by requiring fewer expenses (fewer sports) which would then make more money available for the remaining sports and student-athletes so that their existence could be enhanced.

Changes are coming. Everyone can assure you of that, and I say this because in the past week or so I’ve come to understand the five major conferences want less to do with the rest of the pack. It’s not elitism. It’s pragamatism. It’s the unavoidable reality that those 65 schools are able to do more things and better things and should not be outnumbered, and thus governed, by those who can’t keep pace.

The stipend was spiked by the Have-nots who, quite simply, didn’t want to pay. The unlimited meals might get spiked, too — and while that might be a bad move, it might work out in the long run for the Power Five.

Check that, it might work out for the Highly Visible schools from the five equity conferences. Don’t be surprised if those schools are granted liberty to act more on their own than ever before. The idea is to let those schools provide for their student-athletes — not merely food and accommodations, but also in the form of other real-life luxuries like postgraduate job placement programs — without the limitations current equality constraints provide.

We’ve heard about the fifth division since the summer, but this is something of a compromise. It’s akin to autonomy under the NCAA umbrella as opposed to a total separation from it. The Highly Visible teams could have different rules for things like the stipend, countable athletically related hours, financial aid, required sports and even how a player’s family can travel to and be accommodated at bowl games.

It looks like a separation of classes, and there’s a sense of perpetuity that’s hard to escape, but the business and the reality of college sports have changed so dramatically that it would be a folly to make all the schools operate under the old rules and the prevent more affluent programs from doing more for their people with the increasing amount of money at their disposal.