College Football Needs Chaos, Not A Commissioner

College football has long been a glorious mess for myriad reasons, but foremost is that it may be the truest reflection of American regionalism outside of politics. This idea goes back nearly a century, to the moment when the South began to shape its identity through football; in the 1920s and 1930s, wrote author Michael Oriard, "distinct football regions emerged, and competitions between their representatives each season mapped a shifting geographical balance of power."

And so the latest chapter in the long history of internecine college-football warfare occurred a few weeks back, when a certain manic Big Ten football coach prompted a vote on so-called satellite camps that was infused with the sort of naked partisan regionalism that has long defined the sport. Satellite camps, the SEC and ACC claimed, were bad, in large part because satellite camps did not do any favors for the SEC and ACC, given that the SEC and ACC already preside over what is by far the most fertile recruiting territory in the country. The Big Ten, seeking any advantage it could get, argued otherwise, and the Pac-12's lone voting representative, UCLA athletic director Dan Guerrero, appeared to be so confused by the idea that he voted yes on the ACC's proposal to ban the camps even after he'd been instructed by the league to vote no.

Once the vote passed, the consensus seemed to be that satellite camps were actually good for a lot of players who might not have otherwise had a chance to showcase themselves to college coaches, and the accusation was that certain conferences had acted out of self-interest, which is exactly how college conferences have been acting since they were first formed. And so the ban was rescinded, prompting the man who had brought all this furor to a head in the first place to double-down on the idea by planning a satellite camp in, of all places, Australia.

It made no sense, but hell, this is college football, and things rarely do make sense. That's how it goes with this sport, and that's how it's always gone, which is why Alabama coach Nick Saban recently proposed that college football should appoint a commissioner, who could cut through the regional biases and centralize the sports' power structure. It's an intriguing idea, one that seemingly comports with the playoff era, as college football publicly reconciles with the notion that it is a money-making enterprise (well, OK, maybe not when it comes to actually compensating its workforce, though for the moment, we'll leave that argument out of this particular discussion). "We're no longer complete and separate entities," Stanford coach David Shaw told ESPN's Adam Rittenberg. "We're all feeding into one system."

I understand the rationale behind what Shaw is saying—the advent of the playoff obliterated a certain amount of the regionalism that was inherent to the bowl system. But I'm not sure if appointing a commissioner is the right idea, because part of what makes college football so unique—part of what separates it from professional sports--is that it is a regionalized mess of competing interests. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the ongoing rivalry between the Big Ten and SEC, which have been thumbing their noses at each other for decades, often for the dumbest possible reasons, like the notion of Jim Harbaugh trolling for punters in distant lands.

And I'm not sure if that back-and-forth is such a bad thing. I think part of what college football fans like about their sport is that there is no real pretense of objectivity. It feels so nakedly tied to their own self-interests: Even the four-team playoff itself, only two years into its existence, has become fodder for lobbying efforts and absurdist accusations of regional bias. That's college football, at its heart. This is why SEC fans will root unabashedly for their conference rivals; this is why each conference has developed a distinct identity over the course of several decades. And this is the danger in "professionalizing" the bureaucracy that oversees the sport: It could drain some of the regional color from a game that relies on that regional color to differentiate itself (and if the players themselves are eventually paid in some way or another, as I imagine they will be, the notion of college football being different takes on a new weight).

"Basically, the Big Ten's not like the SEC, and the SEC's not like the Pac-12," former Big 12 commissioner Chuck Neinas told Rittenberg. "It's the old saying: Where you stand is where you sit."

I recognize that there is a counterpoint to this, which is that the satellite-camp debate was just the latest in a series of inexplicable arguments that wound up resolving nothing. But I've long believed that because college football was born and raised on an Argument-based model, the more chaos there is, the more the sport actually thrives.

"We don't make ourselves look too intelligent, to be honest with you," TCU coach Gary Patterson said, "because we don't have one common message coming out."

Maybe that's the way it should be. Maybe college football is better off as a big, dumb, messy pile of factionalism, since that's part of what made it great in the first place.