BCS Meetings: College Football Is Too Diverse for a Commissioner to Work

College football is going through a massive restructuring from a postseason standpoint. Matt Hayes over at the Sporting News has a great idea to go with the new postseason: giving college football a leader—a commissioner of the sport in the way that Roger Goodell runs the NFL from one place; unifying the mission and making it clear that he is working to secure the greater good of the sport.

Great plan; I absolutely love the idea of it. One guy who is not jockeying for a conference or, in Notre Dame's case, a team. Rather, he is pushing to elevate the sport as a whole—a person that recognizes the power players, where the bread is buttered but also is working to lift up the Mountain West, the Sun Belt and the MAC to help put cash in their pockets.

There's one problem: College football is not the NFL. The NFL has just 32 organizations operating under one person. Regardless of division or conference, they all operate on the same standard rules. Everything is league-wide in the NFL: Drug testing, salary cap, draft day, waiver wire, scheduling and all of those little things are the same for every team.

The same cannot be said for college football. Conferences do not even have a standardized rulebook from a suspensions or scheduling standpoint. In college football, there are 124 organizations, some public and some private, each operating independently.

The conferences attempt to group like-minded schools together, but even then there is variance that would never exist in the NFL. There is suspension on first offenses at Georgia, while a few hours south, conference mate Florida has a much more lenient policy.

Getting schools in the same conferences on the same page is a monumental task, so expecting Baylor to fall in line with Oregon is nearly impossible.

So, while the idea is a solid one in theory, the diversity in the college football world does not allow for the move. There are too many steps between Point A and Point B for a commissioner to "just happen" in college football. A massive change in policies, across the board, would need to be forced in order to arrive at a point where a commissioner would be a viable option.

In the end, it would be a great move for the sport. Unfortunately, convincing teams and (more importantly) schools to all get on the same page is largely unfathomable. Hopefully, we'll get to the point where teams do have a more standard approach, but right now it just doesn't work.