"They have zero power": Kirk Herbstreit denounces NCAA's authority following Nico Iamaleava fiasco

College football analyst Kirk Herbstreit slammed the power (or lack thereof) the NCAA has over college football. This is in the aftermath of the controversy surrounding former Tennessee Volunteers quarterback Nico Iamaleava.

Herbstreit appeared on Wednesday's edition of "The Pat McAfee Show," where he compared how the NFL and college football are run and how the operating rules are set out.

"One thing I continue to think about is if the NFL has an issue, Roger Goodell, the owners, the NFLPA, there’s a CBA … they work things out. They create the CBA and there’s grounds of understanding what the rules and regulations are.

"Who is that in college football? You tell me. Is it the conference commissioners? Is it the presidents? Everybody wants to blame the NCAA. They have zero power. They have no power over the sport. Who’s running the sport?”

The hierarchy of who is in charge of college football as a whole is complicated. Each conference has a commissioner who is the main person in charge of that conference. However, not all conferences are equal, and all seem to have different rules on certain issues.

A notable and relevant example of this is the SEC forbidding any player on an SEC team to transfer to another SEC team in the spring transfer portal. No other conference has this ban, and it is the reason why Iamaleava's future is away from the SEC.

The commissioners do not answer to anyone higher up, with the NCAA having barely any control of the highest level of college football. In fact, the College Football Playoff Committee is likely to have more power than the NCAA in some areas.

The lack of power from a single body or organisation means that there is not one clear set of rules that everyone has to follow. There have been numerous calls in the past for college football to copy the NFL and have a general commissioner.

After the Nico Iamaleava situation, it would not be surprising if these calls got louder.

Kirk Herbstreit on the Nico Iamaleava situation

Kirk Herbstreit also spoke about the Nico Iamaleava situation and what it means to the future of college football.

"The fact that people are coming out saying that players are talking about, in the first portal, threatening to leave if they don’t get what they want, and maybe even skipping bowl games or the playoff.

"And now having a player like this try to hold his team hostage even though he’s paid pretty handsomely and he decides — not he, but his team decides, ‘Hey, you’ve got to give us what we need.'”

Ever since the introduction of NIL in 2021, we have seen players transfer schools solely due to the increase in earnings that other schools offer.

The Iamaleava case could be the beginning of a slippery slope for college football, especially when there is no solid set of rules surrounding NIL.