These days in the college football world, in the souls of the people, the grapes of wrath are growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.

With apologies to the great American author John Steinbeck, I use this excerpt from The Grapes of Wrath to describe the world that college football is rapidly becoming.

Three top football schools, taken from the Big East, are now headed for the Atlantic Coast Conference. The Big East's days as a major college football conference are over -- and no Conference USA team they could possibly add will do anything to change that.

The Grapes of Wrath is about a family of evicted migrant workers pushed to the brink of society and forced to work for slave wages during the Great Depression.

The changes in college football are pushing more than half of the 117 teams privileged enough to call themselves Division I-A institutions to their brink - a point where they'll have little capacity to compete against their more financially advantaged counterparts.

The Grapes of Wrath is a story about the little guys in society getting squeezed. Like grapes.

Right now there are 64 teams with access to multi-million dollar Bowl Championship Series payouts. Someday -- someday very soon -- that number will be 46.

The rest of Div. I-A football will get squeezed. Like grapes.

And though it has been the most visible party in this conference realignment ordeal, the Big East is not the one feeling the squeeze. Not the way the Sun Belt Conference is feeling it.

Long after the dust appeared to settle in the firestorm that was conference realignment (when the ACC took from the Big East and the Big East took from Conference USA and Conference USA took from the Western Athletic Conference), the WAC took two of the Sun Belt's teams -- New Mexico State and Utah State -- to complete the chain-reaction.

The Sun Belt is going to have to replace the teams they've lost with...well, they aren't quite sure who just yet.

Most likely they will add Troy State -- one of the three remaining Div. I-A independents. But where to find the other team? Perhaps a former Div. I-AA football team?

Yeah, that could work, if the NCAA allows it.

See the problem is the schools in the BCS conferences aren't too keen on letting more teams into Div. I-A. One more team means someone else taking a slice of the financial pie. And let's face it, money is what this is about.

The rest of college football rode to safety and future prosperity on the backs of this conference's members, much like society did to the poor and downtrodden in the 1930s.

Because much like the destitute, vagrant families of Steinbeck's epic novel were to society, the Sun Belt is college football's lowest common denominator.

The people in Steinbeck's novel were casualties, casualties of the capitalist system. Steinbeck was writing to criticize the system of capitalism at the time for how it left people behind.

I'm writing to make you realize that college sports is the same system -- a haven for capital enterprise.

Fine. But is that what college sports is supposed to be?

The NCAA is lauded as a haven for amateurism. It's said to be an organization with the purpose of doing what's best for all student athletes.

There is no haven for amateurism. There is no concern for all student athletes.

There are only hundreds of capital enterprises -- for all intents and purposes, businesses -- masquerading as athletic departments at institutions of higher education.

We -- myself included -- are tricked into believing that there is something pure about college sports. The athletes, who are not paid, try to get an education while valiantly competing in spirited competition.

What these athletes do just seems so separate from anything that could happen in real life.

But these athletes are products being sold by a business, and the real competition is between opposing bank accounts.

Maybe my opening line should have said the grapes of truth.

Because calling college sports a hypocrisy is speaking the truth.

Outraged, disenfranchised schools tired of getting excluded are the grapes.

Reforming the system would be the vintage.