Commissioner Jeb Bush? [J. Mark English]

Florida Gov. Jeb Bush said he was privately approached about his interest in becoming the NFL's next commissioner.

If the NFL could pull off this coup, they would be putting themselves into a great position for continued success. One of the reasons the NFL has had such trouble finding a replacement for Paul Tagliabue is because of the tremendous responsiblity the commish has towards a variety of different owners, and team needs.

The British week magazine, the Economist details the skills needed to fight the battles a commissioner must wage:

Although the 65-year-old Mr Tagliabue cannot run, catch or throw with any grace, he is in many ways the league's most valuable player. Whereas picking the right athlete on draft day can give a team an edge over its rivals for a few years, the skilful commissioner has helped the entire league to establish lasting dominance over competing providers of sports and entertainment. Condoleezza Rice has long said that she covets the job; but sadly for Miss Rice, she has other duties at the moment. Whoever the owners choose, however, will need a diplomat's ability to mix coercion and consensus, since the commissioner's job is to sustain one of the world's most effective cartels...

...That is where leadership and luck come in. The hockey league's commissioner, Gary Bettman, is not nearly as adept or respected as Mr Tagliabue—who deftly thrashed out a bargain recently to renew the labour and revenue-sharing system for several more years—and was thus unable to forge a better deal. The NFL is also lucky—and its athletes much less so—because it is the most violent of the four sports. Since the average player does not last more than four years as a professional, labour strikes are difficult and the union is weak...

...Like any good syndicate, the NFL under Mr Tagliabue has also mastered politics. Mr Vrooman points out that the league likes to leave one prominent city without a football franchise, “like an empty seat in musical chairs”, so that teams in other cities can threaten to move if they do not get their way. This invariably prompts state and local governments to contribute public money to help teams that replace old stadiums with new ones. Los Angeles residents have been scratching their heads about why the country's second-largest city has had no football team since 1994. But the NFL has made far more money from new stadiums that have been built using Los Angeles as a threat, says Mr Vrooman, than it could have made by actually putting a team there. There is a lesson in all this for Mr Tagliabue's successor: competition is nice, but if you want it to be profitable, it helps to write your own rules.

Who better to do this job then a Governor who can multi-task a big operation and do it with tremendous consensus. Jeb Bush currently has a fifty five percent approval rating, despite his brothers low poll numbers. He was given credit for guiding the state through a slew of hurricanes over the past few years. As a candidate he won re-election with 56% of the vote.

Alas, the Governor cannot run again, due to term limits. What a perfect retirement present...the NFL.