For the coach of a team outside the "Power Five" conferences looking in, the prospect of a Division IV seems like an indicator of future turbulence for college football.

George O'Leary, head football coach of the UCF Knights, told the Orlando Sentinel he feels like the Power Five starting their own division is like when the South wanted to secede from the Union, which of course sparked the Civil War.

"They sound like the South during the Civil War," O'Leary told the newspaper. "If they don't get their way, they're going to secede and start their own country... I think college football is in real trouble."

ESPN previously reported SEC commissioner Mike Silve said the Power Five could create their own Division IV just for them, the ACC, Big Ten, Big 12 and Pac-12. Those conferences get their name for making more money than any other NCAA Division I athletics.

At the SEC annual spring meetings, Silve only speculated the other Power Five conferences felt the same way, but that creating a Division IV is not something they wanted to do. Silve was making a statement on the NCAA's proposal to grant them with more autonomy in creating bylaws that directly affect their schools. Such bylaws could allow Power Five schools to compensate their scholarship student-athletes with more than the cost of attendance.

Like the AAC, the conference that houses UCF, schools outside the Power Five simply do not generate the kind of revenue their more endowed counterparts do. O'Leary was also critical of the NCAA for potentially making the five most powerful conferences even more powerful.

"The thing that's disturbing is that college football has been fighting for years to create a level playing field and now they're trying to go the other way and create an even wider gap between the haves and have-nots," O'Leary told the Sentinel. "I think some of these schools have forgotten where they came from."

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