Chip Kelly says college football needs a commissioner, and he has 4 candidates

Chip Kelly told reporters on Saturday that college football needs a commissioner immediately, and he offered 4 names as potential candidates for the position.

Speaking at the College Football Playoff National Championship media day, Kelly said former Alabama head coach Nick Saban would be one of his top candidates for the job, per The Action Network’s Brett McMurphy. He also named former Stanford coach David Shaw, former Boise State/Washington coach Chris Petersen, and former Ohio State athletic director Gene Smith as viable options.

Ohio State’s first-year offensive coordinator isn’t the first to tie Saban to a hypothetical commissioner job, and he certainly won’t be the last. Certainly the greatest coach in Alabama football history and arguably the greatest coach in college football history, Saban is an obvious choice.

Penn State coach James Franklin pitched the “Commissioner Saban” idea last month as a way to stabilize the sport. A little over a week later, ESPN’s Paul Finebaum agreed that Saban would make a fine leader but questioned if the 4 power conference commissioners would be willing to cede power to a central figure.

Saban currently works in an analyst role on ESPN’s College GameDay.

“If every decision we make is based on money, then we’re heading in the wrong direction,” Franklin said last month.

And, for the time being, that’s the landscape college football finds itself in. As the NCAA drowns in antitrust litigation, stripped of any real power to enforce rules, college football has become more and more destabilized. Players are transferring without entering the transfer portal and schools are negotiating revenue-sharing contracts with players before the House settlement is finalized. Players are skipping early entry into the NFL Draft in favor of bigger paydays in college made possible by NIL. The transfer portal might get overhauled. Roster limits are changing. Everything is in flux.

The notion of breaking college football off from the NCAA to be governed separately has long appealed to some. A commissioner would exist in such a scenario, and Kelly’s other candidates are all interesting in their own right.

Shaw produced 5 double-digit-win seasons in his first 6 years at Stanford. Petersen was a 2-time Coach of the Year, leading Boise State to an unbeaten season in 2009 and leading Washington to the CFP in 2016. And Smith watched over one of the most valuable properties in college football — the Ohio State athletic department — for 2 decades.

Derek Peterson does a bit of everything, not unlike Taysom Hill. He has covered Oklahoma, Nebraska, the Pac-12, and now delivers CFB-wide content.