Kirk Herbstreit: College football needs a commissioner to fix scheduling chaos

Kirk Herbstreit thinks college football needs a commissioner to solve its scheduling chaos, and this weekend’s slate perfectly illustrates his point.

The ESPN analyst will call Alabama-Georgia on Saturday while Penn State-Oregon unfolds simultaneously on NBC, creating the exact kind of marquee matchup conflict that drives him crazy. During an appearance on the SI Media with Jimmy Traina podcast, Herbstreit laid out his case for centralized scheduling authority that would prevent blue-blood programs from cannibalizing each other’s audiences.

“It’s another example of why we need eventually a commissioner’s office, like the NFL has a commissioner’s office,” Herbstreit explained. “I think the biggest thing, as a guy who eats and breathes college football, there’s some weeks in college football where there might be one good game. And there’s other weeks like this week, you could argue this is the greatest weekend of the entire year.”

This Saturday offers an unusually loaded slate of games. Beyond the two top-five matchups happening at the same time, there’s USC at Illinois, Notre Dame at Arkansas, Ohio State at Washington, LSU at Ole Miss, Indiana at Iowa, Tennessee at Mississippi State, and several other ranked showdowns all crammed into the same afternoon window.

The concentration creates real challenges for someone like Herbstreit, who admits to keeping “a four-pack of TVs to his right next to his stat monitors” during broadcasts so he can monitor other games while calling his own. This weekend means dividing his focus between the action between the hedges and whatever Penn State and Oregon are doing to each other in Happy Valley.

“That is frustrating,” he said.

Herbstreit thinks this is a fixable problem. His solution appears to be creating a central authority that can coordinate scheduling across conferences and spread out marquee games, rather than letting them cannibalize each other. The NFL does this naturally with unified television contracts and centralized scheduling. You don’t see Cowboys-Packers going head-to-head with Ravens-Chiefs unless there’s no other choice.

“Wouldn’t it be great if we had a commissioner’s office to just kind of like let’s spread some of these games out,” Herbstreit added. “I’m talking about the Alabama’s, the Ohio State’s, the Texas, like the big blue blood brands. It makes no sense to have all these games on one weekend.”

But college football operates differently from the NFL. The league has one commissioner and unified deals. College football has dozens of conferences with separate media contracts and competing priorities. The Big Ten isn’t moving Ohio State games to accommodate SEC television schedules, and the SEC isn’t restructuring Alabama-Auburn for Big 12 ratings.

Networks face their own coordination challenges. ABC would probably prefer that Alabama-Georgia doesn’t compete directly with NBC’s Penn State-Oregon game. But each network also wants to protect its premium windows and marquee inventory. Coordinating scheduling with competitors would require unprecedented cooperation in an industry built on competition.

But here’s the thing with Herbstreit’s commissioner’s office idea: who would have scheduling authority? How would existing television contracts worth billions get restructured? What happens when national optimization conflicts with regional traditions? Conferences aren’t going to voluntarily surrender control over their most valuable programming.

The current system creates obvious problems. This weekend puts fans in the position of choosing between two marquee games, while other Saturdays offer limited compelling options. But the scheduling chaos also reflects how college football actually works as a collection of independent conferences that prioritize their own television deals over national coordination.

Whether this requires intervention depends on what you think college football should be. Herbstreit sees missed opportunities and audience fragmentation. Others would argue that the sport’s decentralized, sometimes chaotic structure is exactly what separates it from the NFL’s streamlined corporate approach.

Herbstreit will experience the problem firsthand on Saturday, splitting his attention between calling Alabama-Georgia and monitoring Penn State-Oregon on his sideline monitors. He’ll be living out the exact scheduling conflict he thinks needs fixing.