Joel Klatt calls for schools to no longer have control of their college football schedules

College football is as valuable of a media product as it has ever been. With that being the case, Joel Klatt wants the sport’s schedules to be handled in a whole new way.

Klatt discussed this thought during an appearance on ‘The Herd’ on Monday. To him, the universities themselves should stop having the ability to schedule out their seasons. It’s not something that they do in the pros and isn’t something that he wants for the collegiate level.

“I’m going to go on a different wavelength and layer than what you just did. I would love if we stopped allowing individual teams to control their own schedule,” said Klatt. “You know, the Detroit Lions don’t build their own schedule. The New York Giants don’t build their own schedule.”

If this switch was made, Klatt believes it’ll be easier to evaluate teams for the College Football Playoff. More uniform scheduling would simplify how everyone can measure those who could potentially be within the field’s dozen berths.

“I don’t think that we should do it in college football, in particular as we’re moving into an era where we’re going to have a 12-team playoff,” said Klatt. “We’re going to have to rate these teams somehow against one another for inclusion into the most important tournament in college football, which is going to be the College Football Playoff.”

“I firmly believe that we need some sort of agreement on how many conference games that we’re all going to play within our conferences. Then the non-conference games needs to go into a pool,” Klatt explained. “We need to start playing each other more often.”

That would mean leaving it up to whatever leadership that’s in place to plan all that out for the programs.

“It’s not USC’s job to move off of Notre Dame as much as it is college football’s job and some overarching governing body scheduling, in particular for parity, so that the best teams have to play the most difficult schedules and the worse teams have some break, in particular in their non-conference slate,” said Klatt.

We all want the best games possible on the slate on each Saturday in the fall. The product is better that way for every weekend from the first kickoff until the end of the playoff.

That’s why Klatt would prefer to see the sport as a whole make the schedule for the season. They could do so rather than officials at each individual school continuing to do so years in advance.

“That’s what I would like to see. I just can’t stand what we do right now in college football, which is allowing these athletic directors to build their schedules at 10, 12, 14 years out in the back of a cigar bar – ‘You want to play in 2033?'” Klatt said. “Like, what are we doing?

“It’s an interesting point,” said Klatt. “I would like to see college football in general start to schedule those types of games that then everyone would have to participate in.”