Joel Klatt details how the NCAA can fix conference shuffling, media rights issue

College football has problems and Joel Klatt, FOX Sports’ lead college football color commentator and former quarterback, has solutions. He walked through how he’d addressed the Balkanized nature of college football on “The Joel Klatt Show.”

In short: Klatt would move governance of the college football national championship and media rights under a centralized body. And conveniently, Klatt thinks the entity already exists and just needs to be empowered.

“The body is the College Football Playoff,” Klatt said. “However you want to do it, whoever you want to put on that board, the playoff is the body that is the pathway forward for college football. Not only for the postseason but also for the overarching fix for a lot of the problems that we have right now. Because that’s the only body that has power or leverage over those two things: legacy and purse.”

One thing Klatt made very clear: This would be a move to govern football. Continuing to govern football and dozens of Olympic sports together isn’t a sustainable model in Klatt’s eyes.

“This is not 1952,” Klatt said. “So we need to get with the times. It’s 2023. We see what’s going on. There’s clearly a problem. Everyone’s pulling in a different direction. We need a centralized body over college football.”

When discussing legacy, Klatt means championships. And purse, of course, is the revenue — namely from TV.

Klatt thinks that evening out the playing field for revenue and ending conferences jockeying for more money would stabilize the picture. And he knows that the championship needs to be under the control of whatever body is in charge, too.

“Because if you don’t have power over those things, then what’s the motivation for any schools to fall under your jurisdiction? Well there’s not,” Klatt said, “there’s not. So you need power over legacy, and when I say legacy, I obviously mean championships. You don’t develop a legacy without championships. So you need power over the legacy or the championship.”

Ultimately, a more NFL-like model is what Klatt is pushing towards. A unified body governing revenue would even out the distribution across conferences and put some cold water on any desires to jump for greener pastures, in part by making all the pastures the same shade of green.

Klatt analogized a different way.

“If the NFC East could do their own television deal, do you think it would be bigger than the AFC South’s? Absolutely. And it would be substantially bigger,” Klatt said. “And every team in the AFC South would be clamoring. If they could get any value, if they could get any leverage, they would be like ‘Please, NFC East, take us, take us.’ That’s what we’re at in college football. But you don’t have that in the NFL. Why? Because everybody is pulling in the same direction.”