One of the most common takes from college football commentators these days is to call for a commissioner to take over the sport. The thinking goes that NIL, the transfer portal, conference realignment and the College Football Playoff are all so broken that one individual ought to come in and fix it.
Among the many calls for a college football commissioner, candidates such as Greg Sankey, Nick Saban, Robert Griffin III and even Urban Meyer have been thrown out.
The chaos has not eased up this winter, with Clemson’s Dabo Swinney going scorched earth against Ole Miss and the situation between Darian Mensah and Duke getting so ugly that the courts had to get involved.
Rather than offer up that same cliche and call for new leadership, Meyer, speaking on Fox Sports’ Triple Option podcast this week, reminded the audience about the enforcement mechanisms already in place. Since the settlement of the House v NCAA case last summer, the College Sports Commission has overseen direct payments to college athletes, as well as NIL agreements.
“They already said, let’s start another commission. So now you have another enforcement arm that’s supposed to enforce the NIL,” Meyer said. “That’s not gonna work. So you don’t need more rules, you don’t need more people. You need to enforce the rules.”
Former Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker runs the NCAA, while former Major League Baseball legal counsel Bryan Seeley runs the CSC. The two units are supposed to work together to monitor the industry and levy punishments. Already, according to Front Office Sports, the CSC is preparing for legal challenges intended to undermine its authority.
With that in mind, Meyer isn’t convinced that adding yet another executive into the mix would do anything to materially improve the mess that is college football.
“There has to be an enforcement arm. I don’t think a commissioner without any power is going to do (anything different),” he said. “You’ve already got the president of the NCAA, so you want another person in charge that’s not going to do something?”
Yet Meyer largely directed his ire at Baker, who he said he hoped to bring on the Triple Option podcast some day for questioning:
“Can we get the president of the NCAA on here and say, ‘What the hell are you doing?’ I would love to ask him, say, ‘Hey, I got a lot of respect and everything, but what are you going to do?’ Can you imagine that answer?”
While there may be some credence to the idea that a college football commissioner could at least offer a vision and direction for the conferences and the moneyed interests around the sport, Meyer is addressing what is likely the reason the idea has not picked up steam. With so much of the structure and legal precedent already set up for the future of college sports — even as chaotic as it has been — it seems as if the college football world should be rooting for people like Baker and Seeley to enact change rather than hoping for a famous face to save the day.