Nick Saban Says College Football Administration Needs a Revamp to Stop the Anarchy

The college football landscape is in total chaos right now. No sugarcoating it. The NIL scene is arguably the biggest culprit, with wealthy, blue-chip programs using their deep pockets to snag the best players. Meanwhile, smaller schools are left scraping for talent.

The transfer portal hasn’t made things any easier either. Players no longer have to sit out a year or get a coach’s blessing to jump ship, which has turned rosters upside down.

Of course, both NIL and the portal were needed, but you just can’t argue that a little regulation wouldn’t have helped keep the fire under control. Then there are the undetected rules-violation scandals, like Michigan’s infamous sign-stealing scheme, which just add to the mess. Coaches moving between programs with minimal restrictions, like what we saw with Lane Kiffin, is another headache.

There’s a lot of chaos, plain and simple, and seven-time national champion Nick Saban says it’s time to bring in a national commissioner to get this ship back on course. He even emphasized the need for a competition committee to set clear rules for the game.

“No question about the fact that I think we need to have a commissioner who’s kind of over all the conferences, as well as a competition committee, who sort of defines the rules of how we’re gonna play the game. Because that’s what we don’t have right now,” Saban said on College GameDay.

“You know we used to have contracts for coaches and players that defined what your academic responsibilities, when can you transfer, what is your obligations to the school. We don’t have that now, and if you really don’t support that, you’re kinda supporting a little bit of anarchy, which is what we have right now, whether it’s coaches or players,” added the former head coach.

Saban says the College Football Playoff has kind of camouflaged some of these issues. Everyone’s focused on the games, especially with so many matchups in the postseason, which only delays the urgency of addressing the real problems.

“But the underlying problem, in terms of level of calm for everybody, it’s probably something that needs to be addressed quickly,” he concluded.

If the NCAA should listen to anyone for solutions to the issues that keep popping up every season, it’s Nick Saban. That said, we’re still not sure a single commissioner could fix everything.

The NCAA isn’t a league. There are so many schools, each with its own administration, donors, and priorities. Bringing them under one central authority would be pretty much impossible. With their own media deals, rules interpretations, scheduling, and revenue models, it’s also unclear if the big programs would want to give up any autonomy.

But maybe it could work. We’ll have to wait and see if that’s the route the NCAA chooses and whether it actually fixes anything.