Before the expansion of television into cable and streaming services, college football fans had a very limited scope of options for watching their team on the big screen. This is because, for many years, the NCAA had complete oversight of its product:
Advertisement
- They minimized the number of games available for broadcast consumption.
- They had maximums for how many times one team could appear on TV.
- They handled “top-level” negotiations with networks.
- They decided how TV revenue was distributed.
These actions, according to researchers, were designed to protect ticket sales and not to “maximize college football’s profit potential as a TV entity.”
Well, the times have changed. FOX and ESPN now have their fingers deep inside the fabric of college football and are constantly scrounging for all the money they can find.
This, in part, fueled the dismantling of the Pac-12 Conference over the past few years and officially turned the Power-Five into a Power-Four in 2024.
While those networks are temporarily thriving from their behind-the-scenes activities, college football’s base customers are suffering.
Regional rivalries have, by and large, gone the way of the Dodo. Cross-country airplane rides are now commonplace for schools, and unaffordable for fans. They’ve been forced to retreat to their houses, plop on their couches, and watch their team on the networks’ airwaves instead of attending in person.
Is TV profit and betting changing the heart and soul of the game?
It feels like there is news of a college football game breaking some sort of viewership record every other week these days. The rise of betting in modern society might be a big reason why. Nowadays, someone from Oregon can place a wager on an East Coast school at a moment’s notice, and easily watch to see if their bet cashes.
From this perspective, college football is growing more than ever. TV CEOs want to attract as many eyes as possible. ESPN and FOX have successfully accomplished that objective with their puppetry. But every move a school makes on their behalf comes at a cost.
Each time Oklahoma joins the SEC or Washington joins the Big 10, part of the passion a true college football fan possesses disappears. Die-hard Huskies fans don’t care if their school beats Rutgers; they want to beat UCLA and Arizona.
Die-hard Sooners fans couldn’t care less if they triumph over South Carolina; they want to triumph over Texas and Oklahoma State.
The continued loss of these rivalries will eventually sap the fandom of most college football supporters. And once it’s gone, it will be nearly impossible to get back.
Saturdays once defined by life-or-death intensity will be concerned with only point totals and spread. There will be zero emotional investment, zero heart, and zero soul.
Is a purely robotic version of college football still college football? Not in my estimation. It would be a vessel for profit and profit alone. It would be the host for the parasite of TV money.
That is the direction things are headed. Sooner or later, college football will be a shell of itself. And the speed at which it becomes that is entirely dependent upon the TV executives actively stripping the sport of what makes it special.
