Mack Brown would be a perfect college football commissioner – just not now.

Carolina’s football coach is echoing what many have been saying for years — that college football and basketball each need a commissioner, similar to what the professional sports leagues have. That sentiment is stronger than ever with the Trumpian failure of Mark Emmert, the current head of the NCAA.

SEC commentator Paul Finebaum is the latest to call for Emmert’s firing, saying he came out of witness protection last week to spout the obvious, that college football has a problem. Duh. And this guy makes more than $3 million a year!

Once upon a time, Walter Byers and Dick Schultz ran college athletics at the NCAA level, but the emergence of the Power 5 conferences and the BCS and College Football Playoff, which are independently controlled, require more than a figurehead for football, as well as basketball. So many more millions are at stake now with TV contracts and uniformity of rules and regulations that the NCAA administration has been reduced to a bad joke.

There seems no one better than Brown, who is not only a Hall of Fame coach, but he is sincere about so many aspects of college athletics than the games. He cares deeply about the athletes and their four-year experience becoming more like a 40-year experience, since they get next to nothing from the billions that football earns.

Brown knows so much about the game from coaching to academics to health and welfare to even the media, which he experienced in his five years with ESPN. If such a structure were invented tomorrow, Brown would be the perfect choice — except that he is currently UNC’s football coach. Let’s let him finish that job first, and he can run college football after that.

In the same vein, Dukie Jay Bilas would be the right fit as commissioner of college basketball. Bilas played and coached for Mike Krzyzewski, is a practicing attorney and as the voice of college hoops has been a vocal critic of the NCAA and how it has mismanaged his sport.

Brown and Bilas have been around their games long enough that they can smell something wrong, somewhere. Once holding the power, they could truly figure out what to do about it.

College athletics is a multi-billion-dollar enterprise. Time to start governing that way from the top.

 

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