The question of whether college football needs a commissioner has been bandied about the past few weeks as the paths of the 11 FBS conferences have diverged to the breaking point amid the COVID-19 pandemic.
Cal coach Justin Wilcox got to the heart of the matter in an August 19 interview.
“The cause for maybe the most frustration is that there’s not uniformity throughout the country,” he said in the video above.
It’s not just the obvious fact that some major conferences are planning to play football in the fall and some aren’t. You also have Big Ten athletic directors disagreeing with their university presidents. You have some teams operating under different practice rules from other teams in their own conference because of regional health directives. You have speculation that the Power 5 conferences are going to break away completely from the NCAA, which has already happened to a large extent.
Chaos reigns in uncertin times, which the pandemic has illustrated.
Wilcox is not opposed to the idea of having a college football commissioner.
“There’s probably a really good reason to do that,” he said. “The challenge is going to be getting all the conferences on board.”
Indeed, although the benefits of having a unifying chief of FBS teams are apparent, it will be difficult to get the conferences and their high-paid commissioners to cede the enormous power they wield to a national entity that would have to be paid a lot of money.
And maybe college football, with its strong and varied regional biases and needs, is just not suited to a national overlord. A college football commissioner would rule over 128 FBS schools – or 65 schools if it were reduced to a Power 5 commissioner – and that’s twice as many teams as commissioners in the major pro sports oversee.
Let’s assume for a moment that the need for unity outweighs the barriers, and the presidents of the Power 5 conferences decide to create a Power 5 college football commissioner.
Presumably a commissioner would have a staff, but the person at the top would have to be a special person -- one who is respected by the FBS schools, smart enough and informed enough to deal with complex football and financial issues, impartial in all respects and strong enough to stand up to inevitable harsh criticism without flinching.
One person would be perfect.
Before we name our nominee, let’s see if we can learn anything from the commissioners hired by pro sports.
There seems to be a notion that a college football commissioner would have to have a strong football background.
Baloney.
Few of the commissioners in the NBA, NFL and Major League Baseball were what you would call tactical experts in their sport.
Former baseball commissioner Bud Selig was a team owner, but that title does not require intimate baseball knowledge, and former NFL commissioner Pete Rozelle was the Rams general manager, although it was really his expertise in public relations that put him in that position.
Instead we have a collection that includes a federal judge, a Senator, two Yale presidents, several big-time lawyers, an Air Force general, a Postmaster General who was also chairman of the Democratic National Convention, an FBI agent, elite businessmen and several people who came up through the ranks of the commissioner’s office.
In general, the commissioners were erudite folks with experience presiding over large groups of powerful people at the very highest level. They were not what you would necessarily call sports people.
So who sounds like someone who could fit the bill for college football?
A current or past commissioner of a Power 5 conference? Too partial, or at least perceived to be too partial.
A current or former athletic director? Not enough national prestige.
A university president? We’re getting closer.
A Senator? Or a judge? Hmm. Now we may be on to something.
It leads us to the one perfect candidate:
Condoleezza Rice.
She was a respected member of the College Football Playoff selection committee, a group that demonstrated major football schools can take their marching orders from an independent entity.
More important is that she worked at a high national level under three U.S. Presidents, and was National Security Advisor and Secretary of State under George W. Bush.
Do you think someone who has had discussions and negotiations with Vladamir Putin would balk at disagreeing with someone like Nick Saban, even though she is from Alabama originally?
But would she be willing to become college football’s commissioner? Well, she told the New York Times in 2002 that NFL commissioner was her dream job.
''I think it would be a very interesting job because I actually think football, with all due respect to baseball, is a kind of national pastime that brings people together across social lines, across racial lines. And I think it's an important American institution,'' she told the Times.
Rice is 65 years old, so college football must get started on this commissioner business pretty soon if it wants to land her.
Follow Jake Curtis of Cal Sports Report on Twitter: @jakecurtis53
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