Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry calls for college football to sell unified media rights

It’s been nearly two months since Louisiana Governor Jeff Landry first found himself in the middle of LSU’s coaching search.

And with the Tigers now seemingly back on track following the arrival on Lane Kiffin, the Republican politician is now ready to try to help fix college football at large.

In a column for Real Clear Policy, Landry laid out the issues within the sport he’s gotten a firsthand look at in recent weeks. And after calling attention to issues such as varying NIL regulations, the transfer portal and the college football calendar, the 55-year-old called for the sport to enact a “centralized governance” to create national standards while keeping its traditions intact.

“Like every other major sport, college football needs centralized governance, that provides basic oversight, but that still preserves our conference structure, because those conferences and rivalries are sacred,” Landry writes. “This would allow us to create one national standard to protect student-athletes. The governance would set basic rules: decide when players sign, when they can transfer, how coaches move, and set spending caps, so schools aren’t spending themselves into insolvency.

“These are non-controversial guardrails, that would ensure that the business does not come at the expense of student-athletes’ education by requiring academic support, financial literacy training, and extended degree assistance. These steps would preserve the foundation of college athletics, allowing universities to maintain varsity sports and reinforce Title IX protections.”

Of course, there’s a financial component to all of this too. And to that end, Landry wants to see a radical change to the way college football sells its media rights, advocating for a unified package as opposed to the current conference-by-conference model.

“Finally, we need to address revenue, by applying commonsense business practices. Negotiate media rights with one voice. Unifying these rights would give the sport the bargaining power it needs, just like the NFL and NBA have,” he writes. “Right now, college football delivers roughly twice the audience of the NBA but pulls in only about half the media revenue – the sport is ‘under‑earning.’ That centralization would create a multiplier of revenue that would then be distributed proportionally (not equally) across conferences.

“This saves all of college sports.”

Landry isn’t the first person to suggest such a model, which is currently impermissible under the Sports Broadcasting Act of 1961. As such, the Louisiana Governor conceded that if any of these significant changes are going to occur, it’s going to require help from Washington.

“We need the President to urge Congress to pass targeted legislation that will fully fix this broken system,” Landry wrote.

As issues within the current college football system — including situations such as Kiffin leaving Ole Miss for LSU ahead of the Rebels’ playoff run — continue to arise, such conversations will only get louder. As for Kiffin’s untimely departure and his own high profile role in the Tigers’ coaching search, Landry addressed that too, writing: “don’t hate the player, hate the game! We did what we had to.”