[CM Hooe]

Quote: Originally Posted by canes21

Anytime something major happens in college sports its the death blow, but it never actually is. Missouri and aTm going SEC didn't kill the sport. Nebraska going Big Ten didn't kill the sport. NIL hasn't killed the sport. This round of movement won't kill the sport either. For every fan that is lost because the game isn't the same as it was when they were kids, there will be plenty of new fans taking their place and this will be what college football is like while they're kids. College football continues to grow and become more popular each year. Even with the current setup with the playoffs making it so boring, the sport continues to shine. While it will suck for some fanbases this go around, the sport won't die because we lose the UTSA vs UTEP showdown.

I dunno, man, I don’t see the future of college football as so obviously rosy.

Total in-person attendance at college football games has shrunk for like seven consecutive years, yet ticket prices keep rising. All the 2022 College Football Playoff games drew some of the lowest TV ratings in the history of the thing (albeit still millions of people apiece). There are more and more college football games on television now, yes, but that’s at least in part because live sports is the only sure bet in cable television anymore. Literally every major college football program has to grant access of rights to ESPN, allowing one media company to basically play kingmaker if they wanted to (and as they have with the SEC to the best of their ability). The unjustifiable politics of the sport making billions of dollars a year while the workers who create the product each conference sells aren’t even offered a seat at the table to negotiate their fair share of the profits is going to increasingly continue to rub a certain flavor of sports fan the wrong way as the television contracts keep ballooning. Those outdated politics face very real ongoing legal challenges in courts, and even the most conservative of current Supreme Court justices have dismissed the NCAA’s amateurism model as hogwash.

To be clear, I don’t think college football is doomed - football is religion in America, and probably will be through the rest of our lifetimes. It’s not going away. That said, the long-standing lack of parity across the sport, the continued consolidation of financially successful programs in the name of increased profits at the expense of tradition, the questionable politics and ethics, and the increasingly high financial barrier between the sport and the average American - contrasted against the exponential increase in entertainment options over time - is going to hurt college football at some point. Arguably it has already. Probably not in the wallet, I concede, especially in the short term. But the sport is losing its soul - to the extent that it had any - for sure.