For some people college football is something to fill the time on Saturday afternoons in the Fall. For other people college football is a year-long religious experience.

And it seems there might also be some that think it has no place at universities.

“I’ve observed over the years that football has gotten bigger and bigger,” Steven Salzberg, Director of the Center for Bioinformatics and Computational Biology at the University of Maryland, said on the Mully and Hanley Show.

“And don’t get me wrong I enjoy football. I played it as a kid, I’ve been to many games. But it has taken over the priorities of many big universities, this doesn’t apply to small colleges, to such an extent that I think it’s really gone too far and there’s no way to sort of simply scale it back. And I think the best solution would be to sort of remove it from universities entirely, because it’s really not part of our mission. And it’s really distracting the universities’ administration, to a very significant extent, from their core mission, which should be education.

LISTEN: Steven Salzberg On The Mully And Hanley Show

“So it’s not that they should get rid of it. My proposal is, since many people claim, I don’t actually believe this, but many people claim it’s self supporting or even profitable. Then we can simply say to the football organization at our major universities that they could go independent. They could pay a licensing fee to the university to use the name and logo. The students could still go to the game. Football could pay rent for the stadium and everybody would win. The university could get back to focus on it’s core mission of education and research…Of course a lot of people disagree with me on that.”