BATON ROUGE — Gov. Jeff Landry called the current state of college football "a complete mess" in an op-ed published on Christmas Eve and called for the federal government to create a centralized governing body and unified media rights.

In the piece, Landry said he recently learned just "how broken" college football's current system is when he "was pulled into LSU's football program." 

"I learned way more than I ever wanted to know about how college football operates and frankly, the way the sport is run is a complete mess," Landry wrote. 

The governor criticized the rules surrounding NIL, the transfer portal and the college football calendar. He pointed to bidding wars over players and the disadvantages teams face when losing a coach late in the season, even referencing his role in LSU's recent poaching of head coach Lane Kiffin from Ole Miss. 

"But to those critical of LSU’s coaching search and my role in it, I say: don't hate the player, hate the game! We did what we had to," he wrote. 

Landry also accused the sport of lacking "basic business sense," alleging it loses billions of dollars each year that taxpayers eventually foot the bill for. 

The governor's solution is a centralized governing body in charge of running college football smoothly while preserving conferences and sacred rivalries.

"The governance would set basic rules: decide when players sign, when they can transfer, how coaches move, and set spending caps, so schools aren’t spending themselves into insolvency," he said.

Furthermore, Landry proposed all media rights be negotiated by "one voice," similar to professional sports leagues. 

"Right now, college football delivers roughly twice the audience of the NBA but pulls in only about half the media revenue – the sport is 'under-earning,'" Landry wrote. "That centralization would create a multiplier of revenue that would then be distributed proportionally (not equally) across conferences. This saves all of college sports."

Landry called upon President Donald Trump's administration and Congress to pass legislation regarding his suggested fixes. He pointed to Teddy Roosevelt's famous intervention in the sport in 1905 to stop players from dying or being seriously injured. 

"This is a national crisis, not a local one. And only Washington has the authority to create a real solution," Landry wrote.