No one is in charge of college football.
9 creative ways to make college football so much better
Let’s put somebody in charge of this sport for once, and let’s make it somebody like this.
Photo by Stacy Revere/Getty Images
The NCAA’s in charge of some postseason stuff and making sure players don’t increase their earnings, conference commissioners are in charge of making sure television money keeps flowing, and ESPN’s in charge of ... kind of a lot, but this sport has always been a study in something close to institutionalized anarchy.
We hereby nominate our Bill Connelly for the job of college football commissioner, a job that nobody has ever had. He explains and lays out a nine-part platform in hopes of landing your vote in an election that will never arrive. Please consider.
Those nine parts (which get more and more fun as they go, but the important stuff’s up front) are:
- Update amateurism for this millennium by enforcing a Student-Athlete Bill of Rights. This sport pulls in way too much money to still be using the same definitions of amateurism it was using when it was just a series of regional obsessions. And yeah, a greater investment in player health is a big.
- Let players make money, but don’t force schools to pay players. The debate about pay-for-play always devolves into yelling about some schools being broke. Cool. There’s a much simpler solution in something like the Olympic model.
- Just let Bud Elliott go to town on the recruiting rulebook. Bill and Bud podcasted and wrote down some takeaways.
- What’s in all this for you? Oh, nbd, once athletes get a cut, EA Sports could bring back NCAA Football.
- You know that college football promotion and relegation stuff we’ve been doing for years? Yeah, let’s just do it IRL. There’s no reason teams like Iowa State, Rutgers, and Oregon State should get to lord money and a certain kind of prestige over Houston, North Dakota State, and Boise State just because of ancient friendships or television markets. Make everybody earn it.
- Expand the College Football Playoff to eight teams, once we get players taken care of. Expanding the Playoff sounds fun, and it’d help make sure every team has an actual chance to compete, but we have to make sure this is worthwhile for athletes.
- Fix conference scheduling by implementing our Divisions Are Trash, But Pods Are Perfect plan. We’ve been working on this one for a while. It’s brilliant, imo.
- Spice up non-conference scheduling with a national Bracket Buster Saturday. Out-of-conference games need to get weird.
- Do everything short of changing rules that matter to ensure we never have a five-hour game ever again. There’s an argument that even TV companies should be on board with this.
Football is gonna change, whether it wants to or not, and a plan like this is the creative, inclusive kind we need. Please vote for Bill in the off chance that some suit goofs up and accidentally asks any of us for our input.
