With college football season approaching, many questions about the season remain

GAINESVILLE, Fla. (WCJB) – In this week’s Russell Report, Gator Insider Steve Russell discusses the upcoming college football season and the ever-looming playoffs.

There are a lot of people who are excited for the start of the new college football season and there are many reasons for that. Fans will root for their teams, hoping for success and a possible college football playoff appearance or maybe winning a conference championship. But there could be other reasons as well.

For me, it takes us away, at least for a while, from all the talk of NIL, the house settlement, poaching players, and transfer portals, and puts the focus back on playing games and watching great athletes do their thing. But even as we do this, there are still things we don’t know about concerning college football.

Will the SEC go to playing nine conference games or stay at eight? What is going to be the ultimate setup for the college football playoff? And what formula will be used to determine what teams get into the playoffs? We’re about to start a new season and those questions still hang out there big time.

The college sports commission was formed to oversee the validity of NIL deals and oversee the revenue sharing model as part of the House settlement but will it work? Already, some NIL collectives have pushed back, saying that as long as a payment was for a valid business purpose, collectives should still be able to directly pay athletes and that seems to be the case.

For now.

Seems to me we have two de facto agencies trying to oversee college athletics. The NCAA, which has done so for years, and now the College Sports Commission. Is that working? I have a solution to this, and I’m not the only one advocating for it.

The solution seems simple. Appoint a commissioner of college athletics or maybe just for college football. The NFL has a commissioner, so does the NHL, the NBA and Major League Baseball, and that seems to be working, so why won’t the powers that be in college football adopt this? Oh, I get it, it would be too easy to do.

Thank god we have games to go see and watch on television because trying to make sense of things happening off the field is at best a crap shoot, and at worst, an embarrassment at times. Change can be good, but the change in college athletics has some so fast and so rapidly that the average fan is left with their heads spinning.

Something needs to be done to help players, coaches and fans understand the landscape of college football and the specific rules that need to be followed. Like the great Chambers Brothers song from the 1960s, the time has come today for all of this to start happening. But in the meantime, enjoy the upcoming season! I’m Steve Russell, that’s the Russell Report!

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