Kirk Herbstreit confirms that the NCAA is cooked with latest NIL developments

The latest NIL developments suggests that it is the beginning of the end for the NCAA. Okay, that may be putting it lightly. The NCAA has a terminal condition, which is known as chronically bad leadership. Charlie Baker may want to keep fighting his war, but his predecessor Mark Emmert is about to do to him what Larry Scott did to poor, ole George Kliavkoff with the death of the Pac-12.

Herbstreit recently appeared on Don't @ Me with Dan Dakich to discuss the latest NIL ruling and how that impacts college football. In layman's terms, the NCAA no longer has the jurisdiction to enforce rulings on name, image, and likeness. This means punishing teams for paying student-athletes is now null and void. Of course, there needs to be guardrails to this. We have ripped open a rusty can of worms.

What Herbstreit suggests is that the Big Ten, SEC, and whoever else break away from the NCAA and govern themselves. He said upwards of 60 teams can create their own super-duper league, but that number could be larger or smaller. Regardless, new leadership has to emerge to avoid college football from becoming something akin to European soccer. Then again, maybe that is not the worst idea ever.

We have long needed a sports czar. The perfect man for the job is SEC commissioner Greg Sankey.

Unless Sankey, Tony Petitti, Brett Yormark and Jim Phillips can come together, we are all so screwed.

Kirk Herbstreit believes the NCAA is cooked, P4 must govern themselves

Right now, there are nine FBS conferences. Four are the Power Four (ACC, Big Ten, Big 12, SEC). Five are considered to be the Group of Five (AAC, CUSA, MAC, Moutain West, Sun Belt). And with Army and UMass joining the AAC and MAC respectively, the only two national independents left in football are UConn and Notre Dame. Look for them to be forced to join new leagues in the coming seasons.

I don't know if all FBS programs can find a way to make this work, but the Power Four plus Notre Dame could. If you do the math, that gives us 68 programs in total (ACC: 17, Big Ten: 18, Big 12: 16, SEC: 16, Notre Dame). That could be easily divided into four groups of 17. Of course, you add four more to the pot and that would give us 72 with four groups easily divided into 18. The math checks out, trust me.

The single most important thing that needs to happen is for the Power Four to be in lockstep over this. That means four leagues with the same amount of teams in each, playing the same amount of conference games. If that means four leagues of 18 playing nine conference games, then throw in a regional rival and a rotating competitive balance portion to the 12-game season and be done with it.

The only thing I can expect is for the NCAA to come up painfully short in taking care of college sports.