Troy Dannen on time with competition committee: ‘If I had hair, I would’ve pulled it out’

New Nebraska athletic director Troy Dannen has a lot to do just in Lincoln, but he’s in his fourth year with the NCAA competition committee.

That is also no easy task by the way. He’s an Executive Committee member of the Football Oversight Committee.

So when it comes to player safety, rule changes and more, it’s not smooth sailing when it comes to getting things done.

“I would say, like if I had hair I would have pulled it out over why we don’t have helmet communication devices by now,” Dannen said . “We tried for three years and why people argue against certain things and who has a voice at the table to make those arguments sometimes gets very, very frustrating. That said, I think I learned more from meetings with the NFL competition committee. I think you will see more and more commonalities and similarities in how the games look.”

The biggest story last year, when it came to rules, was sign stealing and the lack of helmet communication. Dannen referred to it as something that college football should have at this point.

Heck, certain states in high school football allow helmet communication, but the highest level of collegiate athletics does not. Make it make sense, as the kids would say.

“I don’t think we have data, I would tell you just in general, you know, I can get emotional, but I don’t make emotional based decisions,” Dannen said. “But we don’t have a lot of data to make database decisions in some of the things we want to do in college football.

“So a little bit of my push has been to get more data. Health and safety data in particular as we look at what fall camp look like as we look at what are the right number of days, should we start earlier? The number of games that’s going to be added for the playoff.”

Dannen added that it’s just like throwing stuff at a wall right now. Data driven decisions make sense from a logistical standpoint, but it’s still hard to take emotion out of the process.

“A lot of those things, we’re guessing, we just don’t have data,” Dannen said. “So I would tell you what I learned, who the players in the room are makes a big difference, and how to sell things that you want to get done. Data sells and emotion doesn’t so anything we do has to be data driven.”

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