College football is foundational to college athletics and our country. It supports every sport, anchors school identity, and remains one of the most unifying traditions in American life.
For a long time, the system was not perfect, but it worked. Scholarships provided student-athletes with opportunities they otherwise might not have had, and many of these young people go on to be some of our country’s greatest leaders. But I had no idea how broken college athletics is until very recently, when I was pulled into LSU’s football program.
I learned way more than I ever wanted to know about how college football operates and frankly, the way the sport is run is a complete mess.
The problem is not that the rules are complicated. The problem is that the rules no longer make sense. Every attempt to fix the system has been temporary, and each temporary fix has opened the door to new problems. NIL was meant to give athletes control over their own name and image, but without a national standard it created unsustainable bidding wars and constant roster churn.
The recruiting calendar forces teams to make coaching and roster decisions during a tight in-season window each year. A school that loses a coach late in the season may have only days to find a new one before high school recruits sign and college players jump into the transfer portal. This compressed timeline is what causes schools to pay huge buyouts and poach other schools’ coaches before the season is over.
It makes no sense. But to those critical of LSU’s coaching search and my role in it, I say: don't hate the player, hate the game! We did what we had to.
Today, college football isn’t just running without clear rules, it’s running without basic business sense. College athletics is losing many billions each year, and when the big bill finally comes due, it lands on taxpayers. That is exactly why we must bring common sense to college football.
The good news is that when a problem has a commonsense answer, it can be fixed. Like every other major sport, college football needs centralized governance, that provides basic oversight, but that still preserves our conference structure, because those conferences and rivalries are sacred.
This would allow us to create one national standard to protect student-athletes. The governance would set basic rules: decide when players sign, when they can transfer, how coaches move, and set spending caps, so schools aren’t spending themselves into insolvency.
These are non-controversial guardrails, that would ensure that the business does not come at the expense of student-athletes’ education by requiring academic support, financial literacy training, and extended degree assistance. These steps would preserve the foundation of college athletics, allowing universities to maintain varsity sports and reinforce Title IX protections.
Finally, we need to address revenue, by applying commonsense business practices. Negotiate media rights with one voice. Unifying these rights would give the sport the bargaining power it needs, just like the NFL and NBA have. Right now, college football delivers roughly twice the audience of the NBA but pulls in only about half the media revenue – the sport is “under‑earning.” That centralization would create a multiplier of revenue that would then be distributed proportionally (not equally) across conferences.
This saves all of college sports.
This is a national crisis, not a local one. And only Washington has the authority to create a real solution. We need the President to urge Congress to pass targeted legislation that will fully fix this broken system.
The last time college football stood at a crossroads like this was more than a century ago, when President Teddy Roosevelt pulled university leaders to the White House to save the sport. Roosevelt loved football, but players were dying on the field. The leaders of that era could not agree on basic rules, so Roosevelt stepped in. He told coaches and university presidents to clean up the game or risk losing it. Because he refused to back down, 62 colleges met in December 1905 and formed a new governing body and preserved the sport for generations.
Today, the threat is not physical safety of the players, but the fiscal sanity of college sports. Once again, the sport is drifting because no one is in charge. Maybe President Trump a man who understands business, loves competition, and is not afraid of a fight can help bring the schools together, knock heads if necessary, and put college football on a stable path.
College football is sacred to our country. Let’s not wait. Let’s fix the rules, fix the business, and preserve this great game for our children and grandchildren, so that a hundred years from now, Saturdays are still for college football.
Let’s do this for Louisiana and America.
Jeff Landry is the Governor of Louisiana.
