With all the confusion and complexity in the world today, sports might seem like a safe place to avoid ongoing and unpredictable insanity.

Nevertheless, sports itself has become a sociological minefield. Gambling, the crime blotter, NIL (Name, Image and Likeness) payouts, gender debates, free agency, the transfer portal, mascot controversies, salary holdouts, stadium legislation and many other issues have invaded what used to be a dramatically less confusing sports landscape.

Movies like Rudy, Hoosiers, and American Underdog, all based on true stories, are compelling because they showcase how individuals and teams can beat long odds to become successful in sports when few thought that their success might even occur.

Locally, when tiny Saint Francis University qualified for the NCAA men’s basketball tournament in March, we were treated to a real-world example of this, suggesting that underdog victories might still have relevance despite how money and power have permeated the sports landscape.

After all, the Saint Francis was a Division I team with zero dollars allocated to NIL payments for its players, yet the Red Flash still earned a place at the big dance.

Nevertheless, less than a month after that monumental achievement, the university’s board of trustees announced the school would drop out of Division I sports, powerful evidence that the sports landscape no longer encourages long-shot underdogs to have a place at the competitive table.

More recently, the NCAA has announced that schools can make direct payments to its top athletes, opening up a pandora’s box of uncertainty.

One of the less publicized aspects of this change is the imposition of roster limits, something that is likely to have a profound impact on major college football programs.

What this might mean is that future examples of big-time underdog stories could be snuffed out without fans even noticing it.

As an example, Josh Allen, currently an NFL star, was a zero-star recruit when trying to latch onto a Division I opportunity.

If this change might squeeze out future athletes with Allen’s potential, it is even more likely that it would block any chance of a future Rudy Ruettiger getting an unlikely opportunity to play a set of downs for a major Division I school.

As sports fans, we won’t even know what we have missed, but athletes with big dreams whose talent is not yet known might be squeezed out.

In a detailed two-part series, an investigative journalist identified money, corruption, and a “win at any cost” mentality as reasons for “the present deplorable condition of intercollegiate athletics.”

If you think these assertions are accurate, you might be surprised that these quotes were produced in 1905 by Henry Beach Needham.

He wrote for McClure’s magazine, a publication that has been out of business for about 100 years.

Still, today the highest paid taxpayer-funded employee in many states is not the governor or someone with vast public policy expertise. Instead, it is the college football coach of the flagship state-funded university.

To me, this is absurd.

The sports landscape will adjust to the new bottom-line mentality now driving the college sports landscape.

Just as the Ivy League schools have dropped out of competing for national football championships, something that would have seemed unlikely in 1905, some athletes and some universities will be squeezed out of future opportunities, while decision-makers from the major networks, top conferences and perhaps gambling interests are likely to dictate how things shake out.

Unfortunately, those of us reading the sports pages might never be aware of some of the most inspiring underdog sports stories that might have occurred because money and power now dictate the future of college athletics.

Bob Trumpbour is a professor of communications at Penn State Altoona. He authored the book, “The New Cathedrals, politics and media in the history of stadium construction.” He has also worked on a freelance basis with CBS, NBC and Westwood One for more than 30 years.