The future of college football is more uncertain than it has ever been. Waves of conference realignment, television contracts, and lucrative NIL deals have changed the way the game looks from Sunday to Friday.
Thankfully, the beautiful game that we all know and love is still mostly intact, and on Saturday afternoons, all remains right in the world.
But, how long will it last? With the pillars of the sport being changed so suddenly, it’s fair to have major concerns about what the future holds. Even coaches have their worries about what’s to come.
Oklahoma State head coach Mike Gundy has always been an open book, and he’s been quite candid about what he thinks will happen to college football. However, this week, Gundy provided a potential solution that could save the sport: having an official commissioner of college football.
“There’s just a few things,” Gundy said. “It’s a simple process. College football needs a commissioner. And if it’s one of the four guys, now, if it’s the guy at SEC commissioner, I don’t care, we need a commissioner. And then we need the Power Four, Power Five if we go back to it. Those commissioners are under them. And then we need a football oversight rules committee that is going to enforce the whatever rules that we say there are whether that is recruiting, nil, salary cap, employment agreements, transfers, whatever those rules are, and they need to follow the NFL model.”
The changes that college football has endured recently have turned the sport towards a horizon that includes a revenue-sharing model with teams. That’s why Gundy says that following the path that the NFL has already placed could be the best move going forward.
“The NFL has been an ultra-successful money-making machine for over 50 years, and the reason why is because they have equality amongst the troops. So, they have, what is it, 32 teams. They have salary caps, they have free agency. They have all the things that are in place to create equality, which allows the last-place team to have the first draft and the Super Bowl champion to have the last draft. So, they continue to have equal teams,” Gundy said.
“So, you might have a team in the NFL that wins four games in the next year, if they get a good free agency trade, which is the portal we have, or they pick up a high-round pick, they might win 10 games next year, make the playoffs. So, people turn TVs on and they continue to watch it now all the time. That’s what has to happen in college football.”
As for who Gundy says he’d suggest as the commissioner for the sport moving forward? Who better than a guy from his profession — and one who’s been around the sport for a very long time.
“So, it is a big picture,” Gundy said. “I don’t have enough time to go to all of it. I just gave you a short version of what I think should happen. You know, Coach Brown in North Carolina when he retires, Coach Saban, that’s your football commissioner. That’s Roger Goodell for us, in my opinion. Because he knows what he’s doing, he gets it. But in that situation, the reason that’s being driven that way is because of money.”
