By Kyle Golik
The beauty of bowl media days is coaches and players are more likely to open up about big-picture items. Those items aren’t reserved for just their programs but also on the national landscape. College football these days seems to lack an identity of what it is, we have seemingly seen the professionalization of college football morph, creating a bigger schism between the haves and have-nots. We also see a lack of continuity between conferences of different sizes and structures.
During the Fiesta Bowl Media Sessions on Sunday, Penn State head coach James Franklin seconded Ole Miss head coach Lane Kiffin’s suggestion that a commissioner is needed for college football and that person should be former Alabama head coach Nick Saban.
“I think one of the most important things we can do is, let’s get a commissioner of college football that is waking up every single morning and going to bed every single night making decisions that’s in the best interest of college football,” Franklin said. “I think Nick Saban would be the obvious choice if we made that decision. Now, Nick will probably call me tonight and say, ‘Don’t do this,’ but I think he’s the obvious choice, right?”
Saban is arguably the greatest coach in the history of college football, whose process transformed Alabama into a juggernaut. That process was a complete organizational overhaul and that thought process has Kiffin and Franklin pointing to Saban as the ideal candidate.
However, I feel Saban wouldn’t be a good commissioner, it is no slight on Saban either, the job is unwieldy.
At Saban’s age, if he couldn’t handle players coming up to him wanting assurances, guaranteed playing time, and even what compensation Alabama could offer to keep them committed, the problems at the top would only be bigger.
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Instead of an underclassman coming up, you got the proverbial cold war of Big Ten and SEC to deal with, and the egos that are there from commissioners Tony Pettiti (Big Ten) and Greg Sankey (SEC). At some point, Alabama will come knocking, and it doesn’t have to be anything that would be an advantage just for the Crimson Tide. If Saban were faced with a situation that Alabama championed but felt it wasn’t good for the big picture, Saban would be conflicted.
Again these are hypotheticals, but it really doesn’t address the bigger issues in the room about who is controlling a lot of the actions and that is the networks.
Nick Saban’s job would be more complicated than you think
Make no mistake, TV networks had a massive influence over the seismic expansion carousel we just witnessed that saw the death of the Pac-12, the SEC getting Texas and Oklahoma, the Big Ten going to the Pacific rim, and the ACC in near turmoil of Grant of Rights. Saban would have to engage not only the conferences/university presidents but also the golden faucet that fuels these programs.
Some of the takes that Franklin had were standardizing the conference slate, whether it is eight or nine games, and the elimination of conference championship games. If Saban were to spearhead this initiative, the networks and conferences would be doing an interesting tango. If inventory is added, what does that cost for the networks? Conversely, what concessions will be made if inventory is subtracted?
It isn’t as simple as Saban pontificating about the situation.
Then you get into player issues, something Saban already testified on Capitol Hill about, in regards to NIL, transfer portal, and even revenue sharing.
“All the things I believed in for all these years, 50 years of coaching, no longer exist in college athletics,” Saban said back in March 2024. “It’s whoever wants to pay the most money, raise the most money, buy the most players is going to have the best opportunity to win. And I don’t think that’s the spirit of college athletics, and I don’t think it’s ever been the spirit of what we want college athletics to be.”
In some aspects, Saban is correct, but in a lot of ways Pandora’s box has opened and now we live with the ramifications. I feel Saban’s views are with good intentions, but are those good intentions going to gel with this college football revolution we are in the midst of? That isn’t certain.
College football is at a critical junction, if Saban got burned out and retired from what he saw at Alabama, it is exponentially bigger at the top at this college football commissioner position. I feel the biggest mistake college football is making is trying to centralize a sport that was never built to be that way. The emphasis was the regular season, winning your conference, celebrating that, and then having a bowl exhibition. The national championship was mythical and the debate was always fun to listen to, even painful at times.
Now in this process of standardizing the sport, how do conferences continue to maintain their influence? Again, if the SEC or Big Ten wanted to expand, can the commissioner veto it, think when NBA commissioner David Stern vetoed Chris Paul trade, how much weight does the commissioner have to stabilize the sport?
Saban thrives on controlling situations and everyone adhering to the process, that is why he was successful at Alabama. Being the commissioner of college football has question marks all over what control there may be. This is something Nick Saban doesn’t want, nor would be good at, and it makes him less than ideal to be a college football commissioner.
