While the Penn State football team prepares to play Ole Miss in an intriguing Peach Bowl matchup, Nittany Lions head coach James Franklin used a portion of his Peach Bowl media day to discuss a different, even more daunting opponent … the current state of the NCAA.

Now before you roll your eyes and say, “Oh, here we go! Another millionaire football coach complaining about how hard his job is,” please consider that even those who devote a dozen hours every Saturday to watching college football — like yours truly — should be able to put any and all biases aside and see that the way Division I college football has turned into the Wild West is probably not that great for the health of the sport.

“The schedule is not good. It is chaotic,” James Franklin told reporters during his media availability (h/t Cody Nagel of 247 Sports). “You're recruiting your own roster. There's mixed messages everywhere. There are agendas in every direction. It's more challenging than it's ever been schedule-wise. You used to be able to just focus on your current team, and whether that was high school or junior college.

“Now, obviously, the transfer portal is factoring in as well. We're not a huge transfer portal team, but we do it. That's factoring into it as well. Tampering is rampant. I mean, I think if you talk to any college football coach in the country, that's an issue. Agents, coaches calling parents, calling high school coaches of your team. It is rampant. All the reasons why we've had all these rules in place that now are not being enforced. All these rules were put in place for a reason.”

Whether you sympathize with Penn State football coach James Franklin or not, what he's saying is factually correct. This is the most complicated time, at least in my lifetime, to be a college athlete or anyone involved in college sports. Far too many individuals have agendas that don't necessarily align with what the NCAA is supposed to stand for, and that's a major problem.

From there, the Penn State football coach rightfully put the onus on the shoulders of the conference commissioners to figure out how to fix this system that is at best chaotic, or at worst, shattering into a million pieces before our very eyes.

“I think the only people that can really fix this is the commissioners. They're the only ones that I think have the power to do it right now. Get all the commissioners in the room for like a week. Lock the door with some Chick-fil-A sandwiches and like literally, A through Z, let's come up with a new model for college football because I don't think this is sustainable for the players most importantly, but all the coaches and staff.”

Where college football commissioners need to be to fix the sport

Now I can see where this debate will eventually go. Folks will quickly forget about the fact that coaches are being paid millions of dollars and routinely leave their teams behind when a better, higher-paying job presents itself.

They'll also ignore the fact that conference realignment is just as rampant as tampering and transferring — and remember, it wasn't the players who decided that a Big Ten conference that stretches from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean was a great idea. That illogical decision falls on millionaires who are looking to line their pockets with even more money. But why blame them when it would be so easy to point at the players and say, “Well, this whole system went to hell when this NIL business started.”

Detractors of NIL will claim that before players were being paid (legally), we weren't seeing as much tampering or transferring, but that would be like someone saying, “You know, before we allowed mail-in voting, there were fewer instances of voter fraud.” Just like the solution should not be to prevent people who have the right to vote from doing just that, the solution shouldn't be to stop allowing players to be paid for their name, image, or likeness when they're the ones who are making all of these rich, old dudes unprecedented amounts of money.

Instead, the solution should be to put a better and more stable system in place to account for the necessary advancements taking place within the sport of college football and to properly compensate the student-athletes. There's nothing wrong with players wanting a cut of the money they make schools because, don't forget, long before players began voicing their desire to profit from their name, image and likeness, it was the coaches, athletic directors, school administrators, and conference commissioners who gleefully turned college sports into a billion-dollar business.

I'm not going to sit here and pretend that I have all of the answers or the blueprint to the new model for college football. There are far too many variables to consider, far too many individuals whose agendas I don't care about (agents and conference commissioners mostly), and plus, I've only spent the last two hours tackling this editorial. I'd need more time than that.

But I will say that if I were tasked with figuring out how to fix these issues, and if I were locked in a room for a week with an endless supply of Chick-fil-A, I'd have a solution before I finished the last bite of my 27th Spicy Chicken Sandwich of the week. I guarantee you that.