College football really needs a commissioner, or better yet a czar, to lead the sport into the future.

While I am plenty busy with my day job, I would be more than willing (for a couple of bucks, of course) to sit atop the college football world and help shape the sport in positive direction.

Some of my suggestions (or edicts if I truly am the czar and given power to make and change policy) will seem like no-brainers, others may be a little bit more controversial.

In the first part of this series, I looked at the issues that have arisen due to not having parity in scheduling as well as talking about the eventual need to break off the top-64 teams (or some number that makes sense) into their own division, free from some of the limitations that other programs face in terms of truly supporting the top level of college football.

In this edition, we look at some of the issues that plague the game today.

A good rule, written poorly and adjudicated even worse. Look, we want football to be around for generations to come and some of the violent hits in this sport are not good for the longevity of the game and more importantly, the athletes who play this sport.

Pop in a tape from the 1980s and watching bodies flying around, head-hunting and crazy collisions and then fast-forward to today’s game where the athletes are bigger, stronger and faster, and it was a no-brainer that something had to do be done, especially as we are just starting to really see the effects of what CTE (Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy) is having on persons who have suffered multiple concussions or concussion-like symptoms.

Protecting these athletes is of an utmost concern, and even the most ferocious fan out there would agree with that.

That does not mean that this is a well-written rule.

Ohio State fans have a several memorable targeting calls that stick out in their mind, most recently a call against Shaun Wade in the Fiesta Bowl in December of 2019 that ultimately changed the game, a game where Ohio State came out on fire and held the Clemson defense in check.

There have been other ones, both of the Bosa brothers saw games come to abrupt ends with those calls and the subsequent ejections.

We all know there is no place for violent launching type of tackles aimed at the head and neck of an opposing player. We also know that there is a need to change the style of tackling that most kids learned back in Pop Warner ball, where they would be instructed to “hit what you see, see what you hit”.

Rugby-style tackling has become more popular, the big hits have been curbed and we are moving in the right direction. But there are still times that a well-intentioned rule can go horribly wrong.

A “defenseless” player crouches, intentionally or unintentionally and a hit that would have been in the sternum suddenly is above the shoulders, all in the matter of fractions of a second. There is no intent there to deliver a punishing hit, there is no intention to “target” and now the player is off to the showers (at least that is being corrected in 2020, no more walk of shame) but that does not change the fact that the player is ejected and that can change the outcome of the game.

We know that officials don’t want to adjudicate “intention” when it comes to a football play. Gone are the days of the five-yard facemask, and let’s be real, that is because officials did not want to make that call of intent. Now everything is just 15-yards.

I would change the targeting rule to where there were two very specific degrees of targeting. Both would carry the 15-yard penalty, but only one would carry the ejection and that would be left for intentional, reckless and outright dangerous play. The other would be considered just a personal foul, maybe even with a warning, commit a second one in a game and get the gate (akin to a soccer yellow card). There are details still to be worked out on this.

There has to be some sort of relief for a player when it is a matter of him coming in and doing everything correctly, only to see things change in half a second when his moving target moves into a position that creates a targeting scenario.

Replay in general

Speeding up replay reviews will not make replay any better.

Try reaching the correct decision.

I understand the mechanics of putting a veteran official, someone who has years in the game in the booth to be the replay official.

But does that mean anything when it feels as if replay is less reliable than the call on the field?

That path of getting to be a P5 official can be a long one, years spent in smaller conferences or even different classifications. By the time many officials get to the P5 ranks, they have spent years and years officiating games.

You are going to find that in a lot of sports. A majority of NFL referees and MLB umpires are eligible for AARP and the early-bird dinner.

I don’t know if there is a way to speed up the curve to keep officiating a little more current in terms of its roster.

But when it comes the replay room, there is no excuse for what we have seen with this whole process.

It has only been made worse by sending it in some instances to the “conference bunker” for replay review. Nothing could feel more disingenuous than that.

I am going to stay away from the conspiracy theories about a certain call from a certain bowl game going to a certain “conference replay” office in a certain southern state, going against a certain team away from this. That mechanism should have never been in place.

You either need to have in the instance of bowl games a non-league-based replay center where all of those types of calls go or keep it on-site and have a panel of three replay officials there going over the call, coming to a consensus.

During the regular season, when there might not be the ability to have a replay central for all college football with 60-plus games potentially going on over the course of the day, make this more of a current and young man’s game and ditch the referee emeritus role and have a more current rules expert taking part in this.

Hell, it would almost be better to let Mike Pereira make all of these calls from his rumpus room.

There needs to be a clearer definition of what goes to replay, how long it should take and what the clear criteria are.

The fact that game announcers are wrong about 60-percent of the time in trying to guess what replay will rule shows one of two things.

Either announcers have no idea what is going on, or replay has no idea what is going on.

This would be one of the first things I would address upon taking the college football throne.