In the hour before Mike Gundy took the podium for his weekly press conference, news of the Big 10 and SEC discussing new College Football Playoff possibilities broke.
The Oklahoma State head coach, who is five games into his 20th year as head of the Cowboy football program, was asked about the news and what the scheduling agreement between the two conferences would mean for college football.
College football needs a commissioner,” Gundy said. “And if it’s one of the four guys, now, if it’s the guy at SEC commissioner, I don’t care, we need a commissioner. And then we need the Power Four, Power Five if we go back to it. Those commissioners are under them. And then we need a football oversight rules committee that is going to enforce whatever rules that we say there are. Whether that is recruiting, nil, salary cap, employment agreements, transfers, whatever those rules are and they need to follow the NFL model.”
Gundy answered with his solution to the latest quandary facing the sport.
Gundy went on to explain that the NFL has figured out how to have parity and a successful product through the draft, free agency and having relevant teams across the country. He said that college football has to have competitive teams nationally so that fans all over have interest in the Playoff and Championships.
Gundy then offered two candidates to be the college football commissioner.
“Coach (Mack) Brown in North Carolina when he retires, Coach (Nick) Saban, that’s your football commissioner,” Gundy said. “That’s who, that’s who, that’s Roger Goodell for us, in my opinion. Because he knows what he’s doing, he gets it.”
Gundy is quite familiar with Brown, who used to coach at Texas before his retirement in 2013. He came out of retirement to take the UNC head coaching job in 2019.
Nick Saban retired as the head coach of Alabama following last season’s loss in the Rose Bowl and has since taken over as one of the hosts of ESPN’s College Gameday.
