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adminclose video ChaptGPT technology will change the human-computer interface: Thomas Siebel
Deloitte AI Institute executive director Beena Ammanath and C3.ai CEO Thomas Siebel discuss ChatGPT’s risks and how it should be integrated into society on ‘The Claman Countdown.’
Since the introduction of the artificial intelligence tool ChatGPT in November 2022, the new technology has displayed the power and potential that AI can have on our lives.
Open AI CEO Sam Altman, the company behind ChatGPT, admitted earlier this month that he was even "a little bit scared" of the powerful technology his company is developing. While Altman predicted that artificial intelligence "will eliminate a lot of current jobs," he has said the technology will be a net positive for humans because of the potential to transform industries like education.
But who is Sam Altman, and what is behind this new technology?
MARK CUBAN ISSUES DIRE WARING OVER CHATGPT
In this photo illustration, the welcome screen for the OpenAI “ChatGPT” app is displayed on a laptop screen on February 03, 2023 in London, England. (Leon Neal/Getty Images / Getty Images)
ChatGPT is an artificial intelligence chatbot whose core function is to mimic a human in conversation. Users across the world have used ChatGPT to write emails, debug computer programs, answer homework questions, play games, write stories and song lyrics, and much more.
"It is going to eliminate a lot of current jobs, that’s true. We can make much better ones. The reason to develop AI at all, in terms of impact on our lives and improving our lives and upside, this will be the greatest technology humanity has yet developed," Altman said in a recent interview with ABC News. "The promise of this technology, one of the ones that I'm most excited about is the ability to provide individual learning — great individual learning for each student."
Altman has made numerous business deals over the last several years, because of the potential of his company's technology.
In January, OpenAI expanded its partnership with Microsoft, who will add almost $10 billion in new capital to the company. Microsoft, as a result of the deal, will likely acquire a large chunk of the company’s profits over the next several years (Microsoft previously invested $1 billion in OpenAI three years ago).
Furthermore, Microsoft is planning on implementing the tool into its existing ecosystem to be used in software like Microsoft PowerPoint, Excel and Teams.
Although the influx of cash has provided the company with more resources, it has reportedly divided its 300 some staffers and angered some in the field of AI, who believe the once humanitarian company is now primarily concerned with making a buck.
Dr. Mike Capps is the co-founder of Diveplane, an ethical AI company based in Raleigh, N.C. He was formerly president of Epic Games, the creators of Fortnite and Gears of War, for nearly a decade. He does not believe OpenAI would have been nearly as successful without that significant connection to Microsoft, but also expressed disappointment in some of the business decisions made by the ChatGPT creators.
"I feel a little bit like they sold their soul in order to speed things up, and they succeeded," he said.
Business moguls and AI researchers have also pointed to OpenAI’s broken promise of turning ChatGPT open source, allowing businesses and computer scientists to manipulate and tailor the tool to their liking, as another sign of the company’s increasingly profit-centric mindset.
"They swore up and down that they were going to give it all away because it’s the best way to handle this space, and now they’re not, they’re pulling things down, so you can’t recreate their work. It’s super frustrating," Capps added.
NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) Chief Technology and Innovation Officer Dr. Chris Mattmann told Fox News Digital that the trajectory of OpenAI directly mirrors the evolution of the Apache Software Foundation.
MUSK LOOKS TO BUILD CHATGPT ALTERNATIVE TO COMBAT ‘WOKE AI’: REPORT
CEO of OpenAI Sam Altman attends the annual Allen and Co. Sun Valley Media Conference in Sun Valley, Idaho, U.S., July 6, 2022. (REUTERS/Brendan McDermid / Reuters Photos)
Created in 1999, Apache started out as an American nonprofit corporation to support open-source software projects, but overtime became a sort of "toxic place" that abandoned many of its original altruistic intents to pursue commercial interests, according to Mattmann.
"Even in a meritocracy there are still political controls and committees. It works a lot like dark money in government. It’s almost like the notion of dark money in tech," he said.
While their goals in the beginning largely revolved around data sharing agreements and scraping data for curation, the decision to take big donations created an inherent tension and pushed OpenAI into a situation where they had to work for the benefit of their investors.
"They don’t release their model. I would even give Meta more credit for releasing Llama and allowing people to download it. You can’t do that with OpenAI. You can’t download their models. You have to pay to play and that’s a lot different than what they said in the beginning," Mattmann added.
Earlier this year, OpenAI announced a waitlist for a commercial version of ChatGPT that will allow customers to sign up for a version of the bot that can be integrated into various product and businesses, for a fee.
While many technologies over the last two decades have seen fervent consumer interest, none have seen the type of rapid interest there is for ChatGPT.
"Remember how big mobile got? It’s so much faster than that. Remember how big Twitter got, this is faster," Capps claimed.
The first iteration of the artificial intelligence tool launched in November 2022 and crossed 1 million users in just 5 days.
In comparison, it took Netflix 41 months, Facebook 10 months and Instagram nearly three months to reach similar metrics.
The massive success of the technology has spurred countless debates about how and where it should be implemented, fact versus science fiction and recentered artificial intelligence as the hot topic among Silicon Valley boardrooms after years of big promises and false starts.
"It is so good at certain things and absolutely inappropriate forever and always at other things, and we just have to use it correctly," Capps added.
Large corporations are split on ChatGPT. While some have implemented the technology to improve the user experience, such as Netflix, others have outright banned ChatGPT in their ecosystems because of the lack of available knowledge and level of uncertainty.
ChatGPT has the potential to supplant entire businesses. For example, a company that created an artificial intelligence to read through and analyze legal documents could utilize ChatGPT, which can out the same functions at a much lower cost.
OPENAI DEBUTS CHAT GPT-4, MORE ADVANCED AI MODEL THAT CAN DESCRIBE PHOTOS, HANDLE MORE TEXTS
SYMBOL – 11 February 2023, Baden-Wrttemberg, Rottweil: The Welcome to ChatGPT lettering of the US company OpenAI can be seen on a computer screen. ((Photo by Silas Stein/picture alliance via Getty Images) / Getty Images)
ChatGPT, as opposed to large language models (LLMs) specifically designed for use in a specific area of expertise, is no savant in specialized knowledge, but can provide relatively detailed responses on a wide range of topics, even if the output is susceptible to inaccuracies and surface-level observations.
Although the generative AI technology behind ChatGPT has been around for several years, the streamlined user experience of OpenAI’s tool and incremental improvements to the algorithm has propelled it to everyday use alongside phoes and social media.
You ask it questions and have a conversation with it, and it tries to predict statistically the best input, typically a word, sentence, or paragraph, using a significant portion of all the written text publicly available. The more data dumped in, the better the AI typically performs.
These forms of AI often use neural network-based models, which assign probabilities into a large matrix of variables and filter through a vast network of connections to produce an output.
The AI tool can generate and debug code to help build applications and websites, write emails and essays, offer quick answers to fasten research, create marketing and SEO strategies for various businesses and provide ideas to bolster creative thinking.
The program is phenomenal for people that don’t have English as there first language, those who want assistance writing a letter, or people trying to find the top cities to visit for travel, according to Capps, but should not be used in situations that can affect humans in their health or livelihood.
"You don’t want to ask ChatGPT how much Tylenol to give your kid when they’re sick because that would just be irresponsible," Capps said.
GPT3, the version of ChatGPT that propelled OpenAI to new levels of popularity, uses over 175 billion statistical connections and is trained on two-thirds of the internet, including Wikipedia and a large array of books. As time goes on, the company refines and expands the data set on which the tool is trained.
The newest iteration of the tool, GPT4, was unveiled earlier this month. OpenAI claims it can provide more information, understand and respond to images, process eight times more words than its predecessor and is less likely to respond to malicious requests.
But ChatGPT is still also essentially a blackbox, where the lineage and origin of the information are not immediately apparent. When hallucinations in the code arise, users cannot determine where the inaccurate information was sourced from, underscoring the importance of human-driven review.
In a March 16 interview with ABC News, Altman acknowledged concerns about ChatGPT’s sometimes unreliable behavior.
"The thing that I try to caution people the most is what we call the hallucinations problem. The model will confidently state things as if they were facts that are entirely made up."
Critics have also claimed ChatGPT has a liberal bias, a "shortcoming" that Altman has said the company is working to improve. Generative AI is susceptible to biases from a number of different vectors, including the input of the user, the dataset it is trained on and the parameters and safeguards set by developers.
Altman said in early February that the company was altering ChatGPT’s default settings to be "more neutral" and "empower users" to get the system to behave in a way that mirrors their own personal preferences "within broad bounds."
"[We're] talking to various policy and safety experts, getting audits of the system to try to address these issues and put something out that we think is safe and good," Altman told ABC News "And again, we won't get it perfect the first time, but it's so important to learn the lessons and find the edges while the stakes are relatively low."
While Altman works to quell concerns about biases inside his own system he also has drawn scrutiny for his political contributions.
WHAT IS CHATGPT? WHAT TO KNOW ABOUT THE AI CHATBOT THAT WILL POWER MICROSOFT BING
Sam Altman, President of Y Combinator, speaks at the Wall Street Journal Digital Conference in Laguna Beach, California, U.S., October 18, 2017. (REUTERS/Lucy Nicholson/File Photo / Reuters Photos)
In addition to hosting a fundraiser for Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang at his San Francisco home in late 2019, Altman has donated over $1 million to Democrats and Democratic groups, including $600,000 to the Senate Majority PAC, $250,000 to the American Bridge PAC, $100,000 to the Biden Victory Fund, and over $150,000 to the Democratic National Committee (DNC).
In 2014, Altman co-hosted a fundraiser for the DNC at the Y Combinator’s offices in Mountain View, California, which was headlined by then-President Obama.
During Altman’s tenure from 2014 until 2019 as the CEO of Y Combinator, an incubator startup that launched Airbnb, DoorDash and DropBox, he talked about China in multiple blog posts and interviews. In 2017, Altman said that he "felt more comfortable discussing controversial ideas in Beijing than in San Francisco" and that he felt like an expansion into China was "important" because "some of the most talented entrepreneurs" that he has met have been operating there.
POTENTIAL GOOGLE KILLER COULD CHANGE US WORKFORCE AS WE KNOW IT
A book of poems lies on a screen on which the homepage of ChatGPT is called up. Artificial intelligence that writes greeting cards, poems or non-fiction texts – and sounds amazingly human in the process. The chatbot does more than just chat on the In (Karl-Josef Hildenbrand/picture alliance via Getty Images / Getty Images)
Altman also has ties to many prominent figures in the tech landscape.
Altman founded the San Francisco-based company OpenAI in 2015 with the help of big financial contributions from Silicon Valley’s heavyweights, including Tesla and Twitter CEO Elon Musk, PayPal co-founder Peter Theil and LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman.
At the time, the company was a tiny nonprofit laboratory focused on academic research but has since grown into a tech powerhouse (valued at $29 billion) and a major disruptor within the industry. The company’s continuing strides in AI have prompted Google to declare a "code red" internally over fears that ChatGPT could displace its search engine monolith.
OpenAI raised around $130 million from 2016 to 2019, according to a Fox News Digital review of its tax forms. During that time, the group steered money toward numerous AI initiatives.
POTENTIAL GOOGLE KILLER COULD CHANGE US WORKFORCE AS WE KNOW IT close video CEO of ChatGPT’s parent company reportedly donated more than $500K to Democrats
FOX Business’ Lydia Hu breaks down the controversy surrounding OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and their chatbot, ChatGPT.
OpenAI spent $10.5 million in 2016 establishing its research team, setting goals, and choosing its first projects, according to its tax forms. The group also launched OpenAI Gym Beta, published nearly half a dozen comprehensive research papers, held a self-organized machine learning conference, developed infrastructure, and built a safety team.
The following year, in 2017, OpenAI spent $28 million on initiatives such as demonstrating "reinforcement learning algorithms could be scaled to beat the world's best humans at a restricted version of an advanced, multiplayer game called Dota2." The nonprofit also participated in a report on the potential malicious uses of AI and published those findings, according to its tax forms.
In 2018, the group spent nearly $50 million when it launched the OpenAI Fellows and Scholars programs. They also trained a "human-like robot hand to manipulate physical objects with unprecedented dexterity and scaling its reinforcement learning algorithms to beat a team of 99.95th percentile Dota 2 players."
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE ON FOX BUSINESS
OpenAI and ChatGPT logos are seen in this illustration taken, February 3, 2023. REUTERS/Dado Ruvic/Illustration (Reuters Photos)
And in 2019, OpenAI put nearly $2 million toward creating "OpenAI, L.P. ("Partnership"), a new capped-profit company to help rapidly scale investments in compute and talent while including checks and balances in furtherance of the organization's mission. Through its control of the partnership, the group's reinforcement learning algorithms "became the first AI to beat the world champions in an sports game," that year's tax records state.
"These same algorithms were then used to train a pair of neural networks to solve a Rubik's Cube with a human-like hand, requiring unprecedented dexterity," the tax records state.
Altman's other nonprofit, OpenResearch, has received around $24 million since its inception, TechCrunch reported.
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Sports
Book excerpt: Does the future of college football need a commissioner?
Published
2 hours agoon
August 25, 2025By
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Bill ConnellyAug 25, 2025, 07:40 AM ET
Close- Bill Connelly is a writer for ESPN. He covers college football, soccer and tennis. He has been at ESPN since 2019.
Editor’s note: On Sept. 2, ESPN writer Bill Connelly’s book “Forward Progress: The Definitive Guide to the Future of College Football” will be released. This edited excerpt looks at whether the sport needs central leadership like professional leagues.
In 1920, professional baseball was in crisis. The Black Sox scandal, in which eight members of the Chicago White Sox — star outfielder “Shoeless Joe” Jackson; co-aces Eddie Cicotte and Lefty Williams; four other starters (first baseman Chick Gandil, shortstop Swede Risberg, third baseman Buck Weaver, and outfielder Happy Felsch); and a key backup infielder (Fred McMullin) — were indicted and accused of throwing the 1919 World Series, had, along with allegations of other fixed games, shaken the sport to its core. Baseball had been governed by a National Commission consisting of three parties with extreme self-interest: National League president John Heydler, American League president Ban Johnson, and Garry Herrmann, president of the Cincinnati Reds team that had beaten the White Sox in the World Series. Its leadership proved lacking in this moment, and its questionable independence severely damaged perceptions. Herrmann resigned from the commission in 1920, and the commissioners couldn’t agree on a new third member.
In early October 1920, days before the start of that season’s World Series between the Brooklyn Robins and Cleveland Indians, leaders of the Chicago Cubs, Chicago White Sox, New York Giants, and Pittsburgh Pirates proposed a tribunal of, in the words of the New York Times, “three of America’s biggest men, with absolute power over both major and minor leagues.” A letter sent to every major and minor baseball club said, “If baseball is to continue to exist as our national game (and it will) it must be with the recognition on the part of club owners and players that the game itself belongs to the American people, and not to either owners or players.”
The letter stated that “the present deplorable condition in baseball has been brought about by the lack of complete supervisory control of professional baseball,” that “the only cure for such condition is by having at the head of baseball men in no wise connected with baseball who are so prominent and representative among the American people that not a breath of suspicion could be ever reflected.” It concluded, “The practical operation of this agreement would be the selection of three men of such unquestionable reputation and standing in fields other than baseball that the mere knowledge of their control of baseball, in itself, would insure that the public interests would first be served, and that, therefore, as a natural sequence, all existing evils would disappear.” This tribunal would have the power to punish players, strip owners of their franchises, “establish a proper relationship between minor leagues and major leagues,” you name it.
This proposal, first discussed by Cubs shareholder A.D. Lasker, became known as the Lasker Plan. Perhaps unsurprisingly, a number of clubs — particularly, those in the American League still loyal to the strong-willed Johnson — initially balked at the idea, to the point where the National League considered beginning an entirely new league with a few insurrectionist AL clubs, including the New York Yankees and Boston Red Sox. But all necessary parties eventually came to the table, and figures as grand as former president William Howard Taft, General John J. Pershing and former treasury secretary William G. McAdoo were under discussion for the tribunal.
The search pretty quickly began to revolve around a single figure: Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis. A known baseball fan and an occasional showman on the bench, the 54-year-old Landis was known primarily for his antitrust judgment against Standard Oil, issuing the corporation a $29.2 million fine in 1907, equivalent to almost $1 billion today. (The U.S. Court of Appeals would eventually strike down the verdict.) He was regarded as tough but thoughtful, a grand figure but a supporter of the everyman. He would go on to serve as the sport’s first commissioner, a one-man tribunal, until his death in 1944.
Landis proved ruthless and uncompromising when he felt he needed to be. Despite all of the indicted “Black Sox” being acquitted in a criminal trial, Landis still banned them from baseball for life, stating, “Regardless of the verdict of juries, no player that throws a ball game; no player that undertakes or promises to throw a ball game; no player that sits in a conference with a bunch of crooked players and gamblers where the ways and means of throwing ball games are planned and discussed and does not promptly tell his club about it, will ever play professional baseball.” For better or worse, he stuck to that decision through the years despite both legal and emotional appeals.
Landis wasn’t a ruthless traditionalist, however. The All-Star Game was created under his watch in the early 1930s and proved to be a big hit, and while he didn’t seem to approve of the development of farm systems, in which minor league clubs developed affiliations with major league clubs to develop and promote their talent through the ranks, he also didn’t stop it, choosing only to step in on a case-by-case basis. He was far from infallible — you can certainly find inconsistency in some of his decisions, and Lord knows baseball didn’t exactly speed toward integration under his watch. (Jackie Robinson’s major league debut came two and a half years after Landis’ death. He might not have stopped that from happening had he still been in charge, but he certainly wasn’t pushing owners to become more progressive in this regard.) But he provided as steady a hand as possible, and both the trust in and popularity of baseball grew under his watch.
Absolute power? A dictatorial hand over the sport you’ve loved since childhood? Man, sign me up. That sounds amazing. Sure, I’ve never issued a billion-dollar fine to anyone, and my strongest bona fides regarding my general incorruptibility probably stem from the time I went on “The Paul Finebaum Show” and proclaimed that Cincinnati should have ranked higher than the SEC’s Texas A&M in the 2020 College Football Playoff rankings. But that qualifies as speaking truth to power, right?
In 2017, while at SB Nation, I indeed decided to run for college football commissioner. Granted, there was no such election and no such position, but it felt like a good use of time all the same. “College football needs someone to make long-term decisions,” I wrote. “College football needs someone who can reflect the interest of programs at every level: Alabama, Alabama-Birmingham, North Alabama, and all.”
There was an explosion of commish talk in 2016, thanks to a number of issues like College Football Playoff selections, conference schedules (mainly that some conferences play eight conference games and others play nine), and high school satellite camps, an issue that was all the rage for a few months and then vanished from consciousness altogether, to the point where I don’t even feel the need to define it here. “There needs to be somebody that looks out for what’s best for the game,” Alabama‘s Nick Saban said at the time, “not what’s best for the Big Ten or what’s best for the SEC or what’s best for Jim Harbaugh, but what’s best for the game of college football — the integrity of the game, the coaches, the players, and the people that play it. That’s bigger than all of this.” (Harbaugh was at the center of the satellite camp issue that I’m still not going to explain further.) But even with Saban’s high-visibility comments, nothing came of it. Nothing ever comes of it.
Through the decades the only thing everyone has seemingly agreed on in this sport is the need for a commissioner figure.
“Charley Trippi, one of the all-time greats in college and professional football … said college football today needs a national commissioner to direct the game on a national basis. Trippi … charged that the National Collegiate Athletic Association is ‘controlled by the Big Ten.’ He said he felt no conference in the nation should have any kind of monopoly in the game.” — Macon News, 1958
“You don’t think we need a commissioner and a set of rules to make things even? We’re the only sport in America that doesn’t have the same set of rules for everybody that plays … Everybody goes to their own neighborhood and makes their own little rules.” — Florida State head coach Jimbo Fisher, 2016
“I think there’s a perception with the public that perhaps college football doesn’t have its act together because there are so many different entities pulling in different directions.” — former Baylor head coach Grant Teaff, 1994
“… If you’re biased by a specific conference or if you’re impacted by making all your decisions based on revenue and earnings, then we’re never going to get to a good place.” — Penn State head coach James Franklin, 2024
“What this business needs is a commissioner who has the best interest of the game in mind. There needs to be somebody who creates a structure in which people just don’t cannibalize each other. … The NCAA president doesn’t have any legal authority to do much, in his defense, because they’ve given away that authority over the course of the last 60 years.” — West Virginia athletic director Oliver Luck, 2011
“I think we need to have a … commissioner. I think football should be separate from the other sports. Just because our school is leaving to go to the Big Ten in football … our softball team should be playing Arizona in softball. Our basketball team should be playing Arizona in basketball. … And they’ll say, well, how do you do that? Well, Notre Dame’s independent in football, and they’re in a conference in everything else. I think we should all be independent in football. You can have a 64-team conference that’s in the Power 5, and you can have a 64-team conference that’s in the Group of 5, and we separate, and we play each other. You can have the West Coast teams, and every year we play seven games against the West Coast teams and then we play the East — we play Syracuse, Boston College, Pitt, West Virginia, Virginia — and then the next year you play against the South while you still play your seven teams. You play a seven-game schedule, you play four against another conference opponent, division opponent, and you can always play against one Mountain West team every year so we can still keep those rivalries going. … But I think if you went together collectively, as a group, and said there’s 132 teams and we all share the same TV contract, so that the Mountain West doesn’t have one and the Sun Belt doesn’t have another and the SEC another, that we all go together, that’s a lot of games, and there’s a lot of people in the TV world that would go through it. … But I think if we still do the same and take all that money … that money now needs to be shared with the student-athletes, and there needs to be revenue sharing, and the players should get paid, and you get rid of [NIL], and the schools should be paying the players because the players are what the product is. And the fact that they don’t get paid is really the biggest travesty. Not that I’ve thought about it.” — UCLA head coach Chip Kelly, 2023
Kelly’s spiel, spoken at a pace faster than his fastest old Oregon offense at a press conference before UCLA’s LA Bowl appearance, made waves. In a way, he was basically calling for a College Football Association of sorts, an all-of-FBS league that could negotiate a huge television contract to be divvied out in a fair manner. In a perfect world, maybe that’s what would exist. But as with any other “In a perfect world …” construct, the real world prevailed instead.
The waves continued after Kelly’s comments. In January 2024, Nick Saban retired in part because he was frustrated with all the different demands of the NIL era. In February, Saban told ESPN’s Chris Low, “If my voice can bring about some meaningful change, I want to help any way I can, because I love the players, and I love college football. What we have now is not college football — not college football as we know it. You hear somebody use the word ‘student-athlete.’ That doesn’t exist.” A company man until the end, Saban suggested that either SEC commissioner Greg Sankey or Alabama athletic director Greg Byrne might make a good commissioner for the sport. (“They would be more qualified than I am. They’re in it every day and know all the issues.”) In December 2024, Penn State head coach James Franklin expressed frustration with the state of the college football calendar and the fact that his backup quarterback, Beau Pribula, felt he needed to hop into the transfer portal before the Nittany Lions’ College Football Playoff journey began to make sure he had a solid home for the winter semester. His solution? “Let’s get a commissioner of college football that is waking up every single morning and going to bed every single night making decisions that’s in the best interest of college football. I think Nick Saban would be the obvious choice if we made that decision.”
Did anything come of that? Of course not. But that just means I’m still a candidate, right?
Back in 2017, my campaign platform consisted of nine pillars intended to maximize both the athlete’s experience and the fan’s enjoyment of the sport:
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A student-athlete bill of rights to ensure proper health care options, guaranteed undergraduate scholarships, and freer transfer rules.
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A modernized definition of amateurism that allowed players to profit off of their name, image, and likeness.
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The return of the EA Sports video game. (Hey, you have to throw some red meat to the base, right?)
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A fairer recruiting landscape that allowed players easier releases from their letters of intent if a coach left and explored changes to signing periods and regulations surrounding official visits and other recruiting rules.
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A system of promotion and relegation that incorporates actual merit into the sport’s power structure. (This one’s always on my mind.)
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An expanded playoff.
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Ditching unequal conference divisions in favor of a system of permanent rivalries and a larger rotation of opponents.
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Increasing creativity and flexibility in nonconference scheduling. (One idea: a “BracketBuster Saturday” in November in which everyone in FBS gets paired off based on in-season results.)
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Changes in clock rules that stemmed the recent increases in average game times, which had reached nearly three and a half hours per game.
It’s been about eight years since I put that list together, and damned if I haven’t gotten a lot of what I wanted: We’ve seen either partial or complete success for items No. 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 7, and 9. That’s a hell of a success rate, especially considering how hard it is to actually institute change in this sport at times. But it feels like a lot of the forces I was responding to at the time — mainly, massive disorganization within the sport and an ever-increasing imbalance between haves and have-nots — have only gotten worse since 2017. Why? BECAUSE WE STILL HAVE NO COMMISSIONER! Any change that could have produced progressive outcomes only made the imbalance worse because when no one’s in charge, that really means that the most powerful and self-interested figures in the sport are in charge. And their only goal is to reinforce the power structure.
“I can’t tell you how many times I heard [former Big Ten commissioner] Jim Delany say two things,” former Mountain West commissioner Craig Thompson said. “One: ‘You didn’t bring the Rose Bowl, or the Orange Bowl, or the Sugar Bowl, or the Fiesta Bowl, so [you get] whatever we decide you are worthy of.’ He also used to say, ‘The world cares more about 6-6 Michigan than 12-0 Utah, and until you realize and understand that and accept that …’ and I got it. But we always seemed to find a way to work together for the good of the cause, the good of the overall enterprise. Great, you started the Rose Bowl, but was it all bad that TCU beat Wisconsin in the Rose Bowl [in 2011]? That Utah beat Alabama in the Sugar Bowl [in 2009]? Did the enterprise come crumbling down? No. We’re trying to look at the good of the cause and what’s best for the second most popular sport out there, and what I always had in the back of my mind trying to protect was how we could make sure that people give a damn about college football.”
For somewhere between 10 and 30 years, Delany was the sport’s most powerful figure. He kick-started multiple runs of conference realignment, and the Big Ten’s creation of the Big Ten Network turned out to be a game-changer. But college football’s most powerful figure was also doing everything he could to keep other conferences’ ambitions in check, to almost limit the sport’s potential growth in other areas of the country.
“When people talk about wanting a commissioner, what they’re really asking for is someone whose job it is to look out for the betterment of the sport as a whole,” said NBC Sports’ Nicole Auerbach. “I know it sounds really pollyannaish and idealistic, but you don’t have someone whose job it is to look out for the greater good. So you have competing interests. You have an NCAA president who has certain motivations and goals — and major college football is not even under their purview. And then you have all these different commissioners, and it makes a lot of sense that we ended up in a position where conferences started hiring outside of college sports. They hired businesspeople, they hired media executives, and then those people believe that their goal is to advance the interest only of their conference because that’s how those jobs work.”
“Lately, it seems like we’ve morphed into, ‘I’ve gotta feed the beast,'” said Thompson. “‘I’ve got 18 schools, 16 schools …’ In 2023, there were five autonomous conferences with an average membership of 13 schools each. Now we’ve got four autonomous conferences with an average membership of 17. We’ve gone to that consolidation, and a commissioner is paid to protect his 14, 16, 18 school interests. But, man, it just doesn’t seem like we care as much about how we just keep this thing going, how we keep 80,000 people, 50,000 people, hell, even 30,000 people coming to games.”
Now, professional sports have proven rather definitively that you can be disorganized and inequality-friendly with a commissioner atop the organizational chart. Just look at the last 35 years for most of Europe’s biggest soccer leagues or large swaths of Major League Baseball’s history — baseball had all the inequality a fan of capitalism could possibly crave, especially in the 1990s. And, hey, having an occasional tyrant like David Stern in charge didn’t stop the NBA from basically being ruled by three teams for decades — from 1980 to 2002, the Los Angeles Lakers, Boston Celtics, and Chicago Bulls won 17 of 23 titles. Even in the NFL, all the parity measures in the world couldn’t stop the teams that employed either Tom Brady (New England, then Tampa Bay) or Patrick Mahomes (Kansas City) from winning 10 of 24 Super Bowls from 2001 to 2024.
It’s also not hard to see how a dictatorial figure like the Landis-style commissioner I dream of becoming could get corrupted. (I wouldn’t, of course — you can trust me — but others might.)
You can obviously manage things quite poorly with a commissioner in charge. But the only thing worse might be not having one. Professional organizations have commissioners, and at its highest level college football is now a professional organization of sorts. But a quote from Notre Dame president Father John J. Cavanaugh from the late 1940s still rings impressively true: “The type of reformers I refer to are those who play with the question for public consumption, who seem to say that an indefinable something has to be done in a way nobody knows how, at a time nobody knows when, in places nobody knows where, to accomplish nobody knows what. I wonder if there are not grounds to suspect that the reformers … protest too much, that their zeal may be an excuse for their own negligence in reforming themselves.”
Of course, there’s no place for a commissioner in college football’s structure. There’s no National College Football Office for him or her to occupy. England has spent the last few years working toward an “independent football regulator” (IFR) to oversee soccer as a whole in the country — in a lot of the same ways we’re talking about here — and it might create an intriguing model to follow. Or it might prove to totally lack independence from either partisan government or financial influence. We’ll see.
The creation of the College Football Playoff as an entity might have produced an opportunity for a leadership structure of sorts — imagine a situation in which schools must opt in to CFP membership (which features a set of rules and protocols you must follow) to compete for the CFP title — but it doesn’t appear we’re anywhere close to that at the moment. Among other things, expanding the CFP’s governance potential would again require a vote from Sankey and Petitti to strip themselves of power. “It could come through the CFP,” Auerbach said. “They already have a governance structure. In theory, they could build that out and add all of the bureaucratic pieces they would need to truly govern the sport. But you would need the people who are powerful now to be willing to give up some of that power for the collective good of the sport — you would need to have a willingness from the SEC and Big Ten commissioners, or those schools in their leagues, to give up power to have a collective, centralized, powerful figure. … It’s just hard to imagine that that would happen.”
“I think any governance system probably has to shift power away from the presidents,” said Extra Points’ Matt Brown, “… That could be a centralized commissioner. That could be a different board.” Right now, however, it’s nothing. And without anyone atop the pyramid, any change that could be good for the sport just exacerbates the haves-versus-have-nots divide that already exists.
Writing about the possibility of interleague play in Major League Baseball in the early 1970s, Roger Angell wrote, “The plan is startling and perhaps imperfect, but it is surely worth hopeful scrutiny at the top levels of baseball. I am convinced, however, that traditionalists need have no fear that it will be adopted. Any amalgamation would require all the owners to subdue their differences, to delegate real authority, to accept change, and to admit that they share an equal responsibility for everything that happens to their game. And that, to judge by their past record and by their performance in the strike, is exactly what they will never do.” He was right and wrong: it did come into existence, but it took 25 years to do so. We’ve been talking about a college football commissioner for far longer than that, and there doesn’t yet appear to be much of an appetite for subduing differences or delegating real authority. And it’s hard to imagine that changing without some sort of Black Sox-level emergency.
Then again, we can only envision what we know to envision. “Our imagination is bound by our experiences,” The Athletic’s Ralph Russo said. “And that’s making it hard to see where all this could possibly go. I feel like there’s a conclusion here that nothing in our collective experience could have brought us to. There’s just something, some other event, that is going to influence college football, probably an outside event. I say that because the history of college football is riddled with outside events totally influencing the power structure. It’s demographic movement — where the population goes within the United States. It’s wars. It’s segregation and desegregation. All of these things. So is the next thing something that completely disrupts the university system? Is it something that disrupts the U.S. government?”
At best, a commissioner figure could for the first time give the sport a vision to follow and a steadying hand for guidance. At worst, he or she would reinforce the divides and inequality that have already been established, furrowing his or her brow and talking about how great and deep college football is and how hard it is to satisfy everyone before simply giving the SEC and Big Ten whatever they want.
Regardless, I’m keeping my hat in the ring. CONNELLY 2025 (or 2036, or 2048, whatever it ends up being).
Sports
Sarkisian’s advice for Manning: ‘Just go be you’
Published
2 hours agoon
August 25, 2025By
admin
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Dave WilsonAug 25, 2025, 02:59 PM ET
Close- Dave Wilson is a college football reporter. He previously worked at The Dallas Morning News, San Diego Union-Tribune and Las Vegas Sun.
As the No. 1 Longhorns head to Columbus to face No. 3 Ohio State in what coach Steve Sarkisian called an “epic matchup,” all eyes are on Texas’ new starting quarterback, Arch Manning.
Manning, the preseason Heisman Trophy favorite according to ESPN BET, has made just two starts in two years — against UL Monroe and Mississippi State last season — and this will be his first start on the road or against a ranked team.
With all the noise, Sarkisian said his message to Manning has been just to be himself.
“We’re not asking any superhuman efforts of you to do anything that is extraordinary,” Sarkisian said Monday about what he told Manning. “Just go be you. What you’ve done is good enough to get us to this point and to get him to this point in this juncture of his career. Now go play the way he’s capable of playing to the style that he’s comfortable doing it.”
Manning threw for 939 yards with nine touchdowns and two interceptions in spot duty last season, also rushing for 108 yards and four touchdowns. His best performance was off the bench against UTSA last year, when he replaced Quinn Ewers and threw for 223 yards and four touchdowns on 9-of-12 passing while adding a 67-yard touchdown run — the longest by a Texas quarterback since Vince Young in 2005.
Now that he’s got the job full time, he said he won’t take the opportunity for granted.
“This is what I’ve been waiting for,” Manning said Monday. “I spent two years not playing, so I might as well go have some fun.”
The game marks just the second time since the AP poll debuted in 1950 that two top-3 teams will meet in their season opener, according to ESPN Research. The last time was 2017, when No. 1 Alabama beat No. 3 Florida State 24-7 and went on to win the national championship.
It’s also a rematch of last season’s College Football Playoff semifinal, when the Buckeyes beat the Longhorns 28-14 in the Cotton Bowl.
Sarkisian said these are two different teams from the end of last season.
“If you look at last year’s game, 26 players got drafted off of the two teams,” Sarkisian said. “If you include free agents, 32 players that were playing in that game a year ago are now in the NFL.”
The Longhorns return nine starters and 30 players from last year, but they still are the preseason No. 1. Sarkisian said both teams’ rankings are a testament to their quality, and he touted Ryan Day’s 70-10 head-coaching record.
“They’re not a gimmick team at all,” Sarkisian said of the Buckeyes. “I don’t mean to offend anybody, but the things that they do are sound and so you have to beat them.”
But the Buckeyes have two new coordinators and, like Texas, are breaking in a new starting quarterback, sophomore Julian Sayin in their case.
“He’s a natural passer; he’s got a quick release,” Sarkisian said of Sayin. “He’s a better athlete than you think, and he can run. So we definitely need to be alert to that. … This is going to be one of those where, when you go into the ring with somebody, what’s the plan? As the rounds go on, you’ve got to have to be able to adjust.”
The Longhorns have won their past 11 true road games, which Sarkisian said is a result of their process, focus and game-day routine. But neither he nor Manning has ever been to Ohio Stadium. Manning said he knows he’s got a talented team around him and doesn’t feel any pressure going into such a hostile environment.
“I always have to remind myself, it’s not all about me; it’s the whole team,” Manning said. “It’s going to be a fun one.”
Manning said he doesn’t feel a target on his back as he steps into the role of full-time starter.
“I think that’s all of us at Texas, and I think we kind of try to shift the narrative,” Manning said. “We’re going for everyone else. Target’s not on our back, but we got the red dot on everyone else.”
Sports
Wolverines go with freshman Underwood as QB1
Published
2 hours agoon
August 25, 2025By
admin
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Jake TrotterAug 24, 2025, 08:58 PM ET
Close- Jake Trotter is a senior writer at ESPN. Trotter covers college football. He also writes about other college sports, including men’s and women’s basketball. Trotter resides in the Cleveland area with his wife and three kids and is a fan of his hometown Oklahoma City Thunder. He covered the Cleveland Browns and NFL for ESPN for five years, moving back to college football in 2024. Previously, Trotter worked for the Middletown (Ohio) Journal, Austin American-Statesman and Oklahoman newspapers before joining ESPN in 2011. He’s a 2004 graduate of Washington and Lee University. You can reach out to Trotter at jake.trotter@espn.com and follow him on X at @Jake_Trotter.
True freshman Bryce Underwood has been named Michigan‘s starting quarterback, coach Sherrone Moore said Monday.
“He’s earned the opportunity,” Moore said. “It was not given to him.”
Other Michigan quarterbacks were informed Sunday that Underwood will start, a source told ESPN’s Pete Thamel.
Moore said sophomore Jadyn Davis, who appeared in one game last season, had a strong camp and will serve as the backup to Underwood as the No. 14 Wolverines open the season Saturday against New Mexico before traveling to Oklahoma on Sept. 6 to face the No. 18 Sooners.
Underwood, from nearby Belleville, Michigan, was ESPN’s No. 1 overall recruit in this year’s signing class, flipping his commitment from LSU last November.
He beat out Fresno State transfer Mikey Keene and Davis for the starting job. Davis Warren is still recovering from a torn ACL in his right knee suffered in last season’s bowl win.
The 6-foot-4, 228-pound Underwood won two state championships with Belleville and won 38 straight games in high school.
“Just did the things the right way and used his skill and never tried to do too much,” Moore said. “For a young guy, he was very mature beyond his years, and he’s only 18 years old. He’s going to make mistakes, but that’s what we’re here for, coaches and players. We’re all going to support him.”
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