How to Fix the Problems in College Football and Revolutionize the NCAA

When it comes to managing college football, the National Collegiate Athletic Association—or NCAA—is broken. There are recruiting violations, issues with players earning free cars, and issues related to academics.

There is also a huge competitive balance issue with a complete lack of parity in the college ranks. The SEC has won the National Championship the past six seasons and has only continued to get stronger from the recruiting abilities due to that.

There are also major issues with how the players are treated and trained to deal with the real world. While most typical college students have to take basic classes, these college players can get away by taking joke classes like "Basketball 101" and "Underwater Basket Weaving."

The issues are abound in college football. This is just one way to fix some of the issues that run rampant in the sport.

A lot of these ideas and concepts were brought up on the Kvetching Draftniks Radio show with Ethan Hammerman and Alex Wiederspiel, so I can't take full credit for every idea here.

Get Rid of the Polls Used to Determine the Champions

The college football champion has been decided by polls ever since the inception of the sport. It is the worst possible idea to have a bunch of subjective voters deciding who the definitive champion of a sport can be. 

Right now, there are 14 different polls that decide who the champion is. That's just way too confusing. When the Associate Press and the Coaches poll are completely different, who are the fans supposed to believe? It's not like either entity has any standing over the other.

So scrap the arbitrary polls. In fact, the most there should be are power rankings that don't have any bearing on who the champion is. The champion should always be decided on the field by the best players and coaching.

Eliminate the Conferences and Divisions as They Are Known Today

This is the most radical idea to some. However, conferences are starting to ruin college football's traditions as opposed to how they were supposed to uphold them. With the major conferences realigning, there is even less parity in the conferences than there was before.

The strength moves from six conferences to five, with the ACC finally completing their absorption of the Big East by bringing in Pittsburgh and Syracuse. West Virginia also defecting is going to shift the power out of the Big East. There's a complete issue with the competitive balance in the college ranks due to the continued absorption of the good teams into the biggest conferences.

The conference model is completely obsolete at this point as well. These conferences are too big and too complicated to even be beneficial to football anymore. Teams need to be divided in a much better way. There also should be a complete assimilation of Division I like there is in basketball and a new divisional system set up.

Create More and Smaller Divisions of College Football and Have Relegation System

There are 126 division 1-A and 122 D1-AA teams for a total of 248 teams that would make up Division I if they combined them. Another way to do it is to look at the NFL and how they are structured. By dissecting the divisions into groups of 32, college football would have eight different Sub-divisions of Division I.

In each sub-division, there would be regional conferences and divisions similar to how the NBA is set up with the Eastern and Western conferences. However, it would be like the NFL in that it would be two conferences of four divisions each.

There is a question of who would be sorted into which division. That could easily be done initially in a polled system—as bad as those are—that would have the divisions sorted from the best teams to the worst teams. Then, there would be a need to keep the top teams in the top sub-division, and that's where adopting a European style relegation system comes in.

Make it to where the worst three teams in the sub-division every year get relegated to the next division down every year. Also the top three teams from a playoff system all earn the shot to move up into the higher division.

Adopt the NFL Style Playoff System for Every Division

Ty Schalter wrote an amazing article on why the NFL has the best playoff system, and it's hard to disagree with him about that. According to Schalter, the best thing about it is how the playoffs are determined:

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There's a beautiful symmetry about the NFL: 32 teams, split into two conferences of 16, grouped geographically into eight divisions of four. Every division champion gets in, the two winningest teams from each conference get wild card berths, and the two winningest division champions from each conference get byes to the second round.

"

So why not bring that same symmetry to college football? In every football sub-division organize the playoffs the exact same way. The only difference is that in every sub-division but the absolute top division there would be a third place game to determine the final team that will get promoted up. 

It's pretty simple every football sub-division would also have their championship games played and this could create a massive television deal with ESPN or even Fox and CBS. This could be such a giant money maker for college football, as it's a huge money maker for the NFL.

Pay the Players with Funds Earned Through Video Games and Jersey Sales

When playing NCAA Football 2013 this year and using Tennessee, everyone will know that QB No. 8 is really Tyler Bray. He will be 6'6" and 213 pounds like Bray is, wear No. 8 like Bray, and he will be a right-handed Caucasian like Bray. But he won't have the name, "Tyler Bray". He will be QB No. 8 because the NCAA doesn't want to have the players paid. 

However, EA pays millions upon millions of dollars to have the rights to these player's likenesses and makes every penny they invest back and then some. So why not pass on the money made on these players to the actual players themselves? Without these players or colleges, the game doesn't exist in the first place.

Give these players the money they have earned in a proportionate amount. Even at just $1,000-a-month, these players would have a much better situation than they do now. A scholarship is great, but college athletes don't have the wonderful lives people make them out to be unless they play for a major school. 

Another thing that should happen is jersey sales and partnerships for the players too. How many teams out there would sell jerseys to their starting quarterback, especially when he is on the level of Tim Tebow? Why not let Tebow, or at least his family, earn the money from his jersey sales?

The thing is that all of the players in college football have earned the right to get paid for their likeness in video games and earn money from their jersey being sold. This would also ridiculously reduce the amount of recruiting violations and NCAA violations by teams if the players could sell the jersey off their back after a game or practice and use that money towards their books or food.

Create Life 101 and Money Management 101 Classes Around Campuses

There is a huge issue of former NFL players complaining that they were babied throughout their entire careers. The biggest issue that leads to this is a lack of education for the players in how to act. There should be classes on how to act like a gentleman or lady and have it be required by the NCAA as a "Life 101" course.

There should also be money management education. Basic investments classes and accounting classes could all be combined to create a "Money Management 101" class that all athletes should be required to take by the NCAA. The idea here is to help these players understand the "student" part of "student athlete." Have the athletes understand that they are going to need these basic life skills to succeed in anything they do.

Completely Restructure the Hierarchy of the NCAA

The NCAA should adopt another thing from the NFL: the commissioner system. While having a lack of power can work in some cases, the NCAA needs a way to streamline discipline for both programs and players. If there is a guy who gets arrested on gun charges, he should have a NCAA imposed punishment that a team can add on to.

The teams don't always take care of the players the way they should though. A commissioner per division and an overall president decided on by these commissioners would be the best way for the NCAA to run.

As a whole, this is the way the NCAA should be completely be restructured into a better entity that would lead to less corruption and denigration of the athletes for recruiting violations.

Scott Carasik is a Featured Columnist and Trends and Traffic Writer for Bleacher Report. As a Featured Columnist, he covers the Atlanta Falcons, NFL and NFL Draft. He is also the Falcons analyst at Drafttek and also runs the NFL Draft Website ScarDraft.com and the host of Kvetching Draftniks Radio.

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