College football is the second-biggest sport in America, yet sometimes it feels like a bunch of children running around a park because they cannot find their parents. I love football, but at some point we have to ask a very simple question: who exactly is running college football?
Because from where I am sitting, the answer appears to be everybody and nobody at the same time.
College football generates billions of dollars, fills some of the largest stadiums in America, attracts enormous television audiences and has become a massive business. Yet whenever the sport encounters another major issue, it seems completely unprepared to deal with it. The NCAA has authority over certain things. Conferences control others. University presidents have their own interests. Television networks have enormous influence. Courts are increasingly deciding what rules can and cannot survive. And when everybody disagrees badly enough, somehow we end up talking about Congress.
For a sport this big, that is ridiculous.
First, Players Couldn’t Get Paid
For years, college athletics fought tooth and nail against allowing the athletes generating all this money to financially benefit from their own value. College football was generating enormous amounts of money through television contracts, ticket sales, sponsorships, merchandise and everything surrounding the sport, while maintaining the idea that the players themselves were simply amateur student-athletes.
Eventually that model became impossible to defend. NIL arrived. Revenue sharing followed. Players finally gained significantly more ability to benefit financially from the value they create. Was the solution perfect? Absolutely not. But at least the sport finally acknowledged reality: college football is a business.
And that acknowledgment should have changed the way the sport is governed. Instead, college football continues trying to operate like it can have the money and scale of a professional sports league without adopting the structure of one.
Then We Had the Playoff Problem
For years, another major issue was how college football determined its champion. Teams could have incredible seasons and still find themselves outside an extremely exclusive playoff. Every week brought another ranking show, another argument and another debate about which teams deserved one of only a handful of opportunities to compete for a national championship.
Eventually, college football finally addressed that too. The College Football Playoff expanded from four teams to 12, giving more programs an opportunity to settle the argument on the field. The 12-team format remains in place for the 2026 season while the sport continues discussing what the playoff should eventually become.
Again, progress. But again, it took years of arguments to reach a solution that many fans had been asking for forever. And somehow, even after expanding the playoff, the people running college football are already discussing changing it again.
And Now NFL Players Are Going Back to College?
This might be the one that finally broke me. We are now having legitimate discussions about players who signed with NFL teams returning to college football.
Read that sentence again.
Players reached the professional level, signed with NFL organizations, were later released and then attempted to return to college because of ongoing eligibility disputes. This week, the Big Ten and SEC separately created rules preventing athletes with professional experience from returning to compete at their schools. Meanwhile, eligibility lawsuits around the country have produced different rulings and continued uncertainty over who should actually be allowed to play. The NFL even had to clarify that players who return to college would not be eligible to return to the NFL during the 2026 season.
How did we even get here?
I am not blaming the players. If the rules give someone an opportunity to make money, continue playing and potentially improve his future, of course he is going to explore it. The problem is that the system allowed the situation to become this confusing in the first place.
One conference should not have one answer while another conference potentially has another. A player’s eligibility should not depend on which judge happens to hear a lawsuit. College football needs actual rules, and somebody needs to be responsible for enforcing them.
Stop Calling This Just Amateur Athletics
This is where college football needs to make up its mind. Whenever billions of dollars are being generated, we cannot keep hiding behind the argument that these are simply young adults and student-athletes playing an amateur sport.
Yes, they are students. Yes, many of them are extremely young. And yes, education should remain an important part of college athletics. But the operation surrounding them is a massive business. Once billions of dollars are changing hands, billion-dollar television agreements are being negotiated, coaches are earning enormous salaries, players are receiving significant compensation and universities are constructing massive athletic operations, you need professional management.
You need clear rules. You need stability. Most importantly, you need leadership.
College Football Needs a Commissioner
Look at America’s major professional sports leagues. The NFL has a commissioner. The NBA has a commissioner. The NHL has a commissioner. Major League Baseball has a commissioner.
Those commissioners are not perfect. Fans criticize them constantly, and sometimes deservedly so. But somebody is ultimately responsible for overseeing the league. When billionaire owners disagree, there is a league structure in place to negotiate between competing interests. There are collective rules. There are standardized procedures. There is an authority responsible for protecting the overall product rather than simply the interests of one individual team.
College football does not have that.
Instead, it has conference commissioners protecting their conferences, university presidents protecting their universities, athletic departments protecting themselves, television partners protecting their investments and the NCAA attempting to govern an enormous system containing institutions with wildly different interests.
Who is protecting college football?
That is the question. College football needs someone whose job is not to make the SEC stronger than the Big Ten or the Big Ten stronger than the SEC. It needs someone whose responsibility is making college football itself stronger.
Call the position commissioner. Call it CEO. Call it whatever you want.
Just hire a grown person and let somebody run the sport.
Create Rules Before the Next Crisis
A college football commissioner could help establish consistent national standards for the issues that keep creating chaos. Transfer rules should be clear. Eligibility rules should be clear. Revenue-sharing rules should be clear. The relationship between professional football and college eligibility should definitely be clear. The playoff structure should not constantly feel like a political negotiation between conferences.
And when disputes happen—and they absolutely will—the sport should have an established governance structure capable of resolving them instead of repeatedly reaching the point where Congress or another courtroom becomes part of the conversation.
You cannot eliminate every disagreement. The NFL, NBA, MLB and NHL certainly haven’t. But you can create a structure for dealing with them.
College football desperately needs one.
This Sport Is Too Big for This
College football is incredible. The traditions are incredible. The rivalries are incredible. The stadiums, marching bands, student sections and Saturday atmospheres create something professional football cannot replicate.
That is exactly why this is so frustrating. College football has become too successful to continue operating like this.
The sport spent years fighting over player compensation before finally accepting that athletes deserved access to the enormous amount of money surrounding the game. It spent years arguing about an overly exclusive postseason before finally expanding the playoff. Now we have eligibility disputes reaching the point where former NFL players are attempting to return to college football and individual conferences are creating their own emergency rules to deal with it.
What is the next crisis? Nobody knows. And that’s the problem.
College football cannot keep waiting until something breaks and then scrambling to figure out what the rules should have been. You are one of the biggest sports in America. You generate billions of dollars. Act like it.
Hire a commissioner. Hire a CEO. Create a legitimate governance structure. Get the conferences in a room, establish rules everybody has to follow and give somebody the authority to mediate disputes when inevitably they disagree.
Because college football does not have a popularity problem. It does not have a money problem. It does not have a passion problem.
College football has a leadership problem.
And it is time somebody actually fixed it.
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