Paul Finebaum reacts to Pac 12 commissioner George Kliavkoff's takedown of NCAA governance
Paul Finebaum has strong thoughts on Pac-12 Commissioner George Kliavkoff stating that the NCAA should not govern college football.
During an appearance on McElroy and Cubelic in the Morning, Finebaum responded to Kliavkoff telling The Athletic, “We have to be realistic about the fact that football is a unique animal among the rest of the college sports and that there are conferences that should be more aligned and should be more in control of the future of high-level college football.”
Finebaum began, “Well, I’m glad to see George join the parade. If it wasn’t for George, we might be a year from talking about a CFP, twelve-team expansion Playoff. But he got in last year around this time, he got his feelings hurt because he was learning things that he didn’t know, and then he did a really nice job of torpedoing something that would’ve served his conference perhaps more than any other conference.
“What he’s stating is obvious, and many have said it before him, that the NCAA really shouldn’t be involved, in any way, in football. They really aren’t involved very much. College football controls it’s own post-season, at least from the CFP standpoint. But he’s also signaling the future of college sports. At what date it is going to happen is simply impossible to predict, but the model is in the process of being blown to smithereens. They’ll mask it by coming up with all these new rules, with this new transformation committee. It’ll be better than it was, but the NCAA model still needs to be blown up. The top of the Power Five need to breakaway and have their own existence, and I think we’ll have a much more enjoyable sport.”
While the College Football Playoff has been the biggest topic of discussion over the past year for Kliavkoff and his fellow commissioners, as expansion seems to be on the horizon. A new model has not been determined yet but it’s something the Power Five conferences will want to have control over, and Finebaum believes that would’ve been accomplished by now if Kliavkoff was on-board from the start.
Moreover, Kliavkoff also cited how the NCAA runs over 1,000 different schools over three different divisions. He told The Athletic that breaking away would give the FBS a set of rules that works best for them when say, compared to Division III.
“For me, it would make sense to have self-governance for a smaller group of conferences than the 32 that currently make up Division I,” Kliavkoff said. “But that doesn’t necessarily mean being separate from the NCAA. You can do that within the NCAA, similar to the way certain autonomy was given to the (Power 5) conferences for certain issues.”
While George Kliavkoff seems to finally be on board with the rest of the Power Five commissioners, Paul Finebaum isn’t ready to celebrate him. He’s simply shrugging his shoulders, believing this is something that should’ve happened last year.