Robert Griffin III volunteers to be college football commissioner

Robert Griffin III wants to be college football commissioner.

The former Heisman Trophy winner and current Fox Sports analyst made his pitch on CNBC’s “Sport” with Alex Sherman this week, saying he’d raise his hand for the job and would love the challenge of figuring out how to serve coaches, players, and universities better than the current system does.

Griffin’s comments came during a conversation about regulation and power structures in college football. He argued that the old power dynamics between schools and student-athletes are gone for good, and that the sport needs someone to navigate the new reality where players can maximize their earning potential through NIL. Griffin pointed to coaches like Nick Saban retiring suddenly as evidence that the shift has been difficult for people who thrived under the old model.

“You know, I’d be the first one to say, ‘I raise my hand, and I’d love to be the commissioner of college football,'” Griffin said. “That would be a fun job to try to figure out the best way to serve both the coaches, the players, the student-athletes, and the universities in a better way.”

Griffin isn’t the first person to volunteer for a commissioner job that doesn’t exist. James Franklin proposed Nick Saban for the role last December, arguing Saban would be perfect to oversee the sport and implement reforms. Texas Tech coach Joey McGuire took a different approach earlier this month, endorsing Josh Pate for the job. Pate, an independent college football commentator and content creator, has referred to himself as “the future college football commissioner” and laid out specific changes he would make to the sport’s calendar.

But Griffin’s actually volunteering himself rather than nominating someone else. He framed the job as serving everyone involved in college football, though he didn’t get into specifics about how someone in that role would actually wield power or what authority they would have.

The problem is that college football currently operates as a loose confederation of conferences with competing interests. The College Football Playoff has a commissioner in Bill Hancock, but his authority is limited to managing the playoff itself. He doesn’t oversee the sport.

Whether Griffin would actually be good at the commissioner job is anyone’s guess. He understands the player side from winning the Heisman at Baylor in 2011, and he’s built a media career that includes his podcast, Outta Pocket with RGIII, which he co-hosts with his wife, Grete. He joined Fox after ESPN let him go, where he served as a college football and NFL analyst starting in 2021. He’s in his first season with the network, working as the analyst on the No. 2 college football crew alongside play-by-play announcer Jason Benetti and sideline reporter Alexa Landestoy. He’s also set to call his first NFL game for Fox this Sunday when the New Orleans Saints host the Carolina Panthers.

But playing quarterback and talking on television doesn’t automatically qualify you to negotiate with conference commissioners, university presidents, and broadcast networks, who each have their own agendas and billions of dollars at stake. Griffin is right that college football needs someone to figure this out, but the job he’s volunteering for doesn’t exist and probably never will.