College football’s future is as uncertain as its ever been due to widespread changes across the sport in recent years.
From the introduction of name, image, and likeness to conference realignment on a scale never seen before, the game looks entirely different than it did a decade ago — luckily it still has the same pageantry and tradition on Saturday afternoons that make it the best sport on Earth.
However, the sport’s ever-changing landscape does have plenty of folks grasping for straws when it comes to how the game will be managed in the future.
On Tuesday, a group called College Sports Tomorrow shared a proposal that would preserve the sport’s future. Coined the College Student Football League (CSFL), this proposal would be the introduction of a College Football Superleague that includes a tier system to differentiate the “Power 12” programs from the “Group of Eight” programs.
Among other changes that would help return college football to simpler times, one of the proposed stipulations in this idea would be a commissioner that governs college football as a separate entity from the other collegiate sports.
Oklahoma State head coach Mike Gundy spoke with the media this week and thinks that is the direction that college football is headed, and they even had a couple of suggestions as to who would be a good fit.
“It’s a simple process,” Gundy said. “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.”
However, SEC Commissioner Greg Sankey isn’t really interested in any of that kind of talk. In fact, he says that he doesn’t want to “dumb down the SEC” to be a part of some “super league.”
In a recent appearance on the Triple Option podcast — with Mark Ingram, Urban Meyer, and Rob Stone — Sankey discussed why he doesn’t believe that having a college football commissioner is the simple fix that some believe it to be.
“But just having a commissioner wouldn’t solve the transfer portal and the legalities around that,” Sankey said. “It wouldn’t solve the name, image and likeness issues. It wouldn’t resolve lawsuits. And so we have to deal with what’s in front of us. We have to deal with that in the system we have, and it’s going to have to adapt. Would that lend itself to some kind of central coordination? I think that’s a lot more difficult proposition that people understand, and that’s why I go back to the COVID example to say: that didn’t work so well.
“And you could put in these independent entities, some central authority, and have your own level of walk away, if you will, from decisions. So it’ll be talked about. I’ve studied it a little bit, and I come back to: I don’t want to dumb down the Southeastern Conference to be part of some Super League notion of 70 teams that some people speculate would happen. They want to be us, and that’s on them to figure it out, not on me to bring myself back to Earth.”
What do you think? Does college football need a commissioner or something else entirely to fix its most significant issues? Let us know what you think in the HCS member forums!
