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Ohio State athletic director proposes for college football to stay with CFP, not NCAA

by:Austin Brezina•05/04/22•

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Nils Nilsen /Sports Illustrated via Getty Images

Ohio State athletic director Gene Smith has proposed an alternate path for the future of college football, possibly independent of the NCAA. Smith proposed the idea that college football is large enough to require a unique set of rules and governance that the College Football Playoff system could possibly provide guidance for. The proposal would greatly alter the nature of college football and the NCAA rules that oversee programs.

Ohio State’s Gene Smith on possibly leaving NCAA

Smith proposed his idea on Tuesday, according to an ESPN report, that the 10 FBS conferences should all operate underneath the umbrella of the College Football Playoff system. His proposal stated that the FBS would follow its own rules and structure, while the NCAA continues to host championships for the FCS, all of basketball and Olympic sports.

Effectively, it would allow the FBS programs to grow under a football-focused leadership instead of the NCAA.

“We [can] create our own rules, create our own governance structure, have our own enforcement, we have our own requirements, whatever that might be,” Smith said. “That might be in the medical space, for example, if a student-athlete is injured and hurt in his or her senior year. You take care of them when they’re done until they’re healed. And we have the funding in place to do that. You don’t touch anything else with the NCAA. You keep the academic requirements in place. The reality is, those schools who offer 85 scholarships in football have made a different commitment and that needs to be addressed.”

Smith stated that he has shared the idea with his peers and opinions are mixed on the change. Overall, the direction of college football has been dramatically shifting over the past few years with the changes to Name, Image and Likeness deals and the NCAA Transfer Portal. As the landscape shifts, Smith and proponents of this change believe the rules for large football programs need to be customized to the sport itself.