I personally believe that ESPN, the Supreme Court and the conferences will end up killing college football, but that’s just me. I just don’t think that if it keeps going the way it does with the money and greed that it’s sustainable.
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I only follow one team anymore but the sport isn't amateur anymore and the charm is quickly fading.
There isn't a future for colleges and there certainly isn't a future for college sports.
The state of college football is a direct result of the refusal of the NFL to create a developmental league like the NBA and MLB did.
There's a huge disconnect between what ought happen and what will happen. What OUGHT happen is that colleges should drop gridiron football entirely; they aren't going to.
Accepting that they're not going to, what should happen is that the FBS should be spun off from the NCAA and established as a developmental league of the NFL, retaining a sponsorship & branding relationship with their host schools but ultimately becoming a commercial enterprise.
Not every program will survive this transition. And some programs will eventually decide to move.
Just speaking from why they didn’t: college football is free, making minor league football would cost them a whole bunch of money.
In addition, the whole appeal of college athletics is the emotional attachment to alma maters, which is why the G League and MiLB gets almost zero viewership compared to their college equivalents.
College athletics (mainly football and basketball) is a scheme to drive up donations and applications, so the universities will never give that up, but what’s happening to college football might just kill it out of sheer greed. Someone has to be the Chicago Bears. Someone has to be the Arizona Cardinals.
But good attendance. Excepting the covid years, MiLB is profitable. The money isn't blowing the doors off, but its enough to pay the bills. Baseball has LONG recognized the need for developmental leagues to recruit from, because pitching is one of the most physically demanding jobs there is. Once the Cardinals started doing it in the 1920's, EVERYONE had to follow suit because it was a pitching arms race. You couldn't afford NOT to have a stable of pitchers to call up.
It improves the sport overall to have a development pipeline. The NHL has had it for a while, and the NBA is starting to use it too.
The NFL sees college football as the free version of that, which saves them a shit load of money, so in my opinion they’re only gonna do that if college football completely collapses.
The 2 biggest problems are 1. Colleges/ players consistently changing conferences/teams for monetary gain and 2. Using NIL instead of the money the teams bring in. We could have avoided all of this by not having 3 college sports fund the other 30+, remove the collegiate requirements to enter the NFL so we don’t have to pretend they actually earn their degrees. Every football player could have earned a free college ride plus some without NIL if the teams actually held onto their earnings instead of communism colleges using them to pay for everyone else. This death spiral is entirely due to colleges communist tendencies and the government enabling and enforcing it.
Yeah, you basically got it right. In order to comply with Title IX, schools must give an equal amount of athletic scholarships to both men and women. In Division I, there are 85 football scholarships and 12 men’s basketball scholarships, so you end up having 12 women’s basketball scholarships and then 85 women’s scholarships going to the “non-revenue” sports (to the people unfamiliar, think about stuff like rowing, track, softball, etc), and that’s pretending that men only play football and basketball, the real number is way higher than that.
The NFL’s never going to do a G League unless college football complete collapses, because it’ll cost them too much money, colleges make too much money off of it.
I do agree with the fact that college coaches make way too much, it’s to the point where Saban and Smart make more than NFL coaches.
College football might end up fucking Title IX though, that’s probably the only good thing that’ll come out of this greed.
Title 9 was one of the biggest fuck yous for men’s sports. It set the grounds for the wnba to be financed by the NBA, the lpga to be financed by the pga, for women’s soccer to be paid the same while being in a fraction of revenue. It was straight socialism under the guise of “equality”.
I think what you'll essentially see is the "biggest" 50-60 or so programs form a new division/subdivision that essentially becomes NFL-lite and gets "all" the money. The teams that are left out will dissolve due to insolvency (no more big TV deals) or reduce the size of their program to where they can afford them. Whatever is left of the sport after the new stratification stabilizes will return to a more regional sport (aside from the new "FAS" subdivision as I've seen it called) but many historic rivalries and teams will die, and unless your school is in the new subdivision or can somehow get their own TV crew, the only way to watch most games anymore will be to pay for a ticket and actually go.
I think the university system is doomed in and of itself, and sports are one of the things keeping it going. So, I hope it fails.
I’ve become disillusioned with college ball. Generally I only follow one team, but I pay attention to other teams in that it affects my team. I’ve long thought there was corruption in officiating, but could never prove it. I always just thought, “it isn’t corruption, it’s just your personal bias for your team.” But as time goes by I’m more convinced it isn’t bias or incompetence, because I’m seeing some teams more affected by it than others. But this year is really what has killed it for me, because on top of the corrupt officiating, the people in charge of seeding the playoffs dropped any pretense of fairness and clearly just put the teams that they think are the money makers in the playoffs. I mean, they’ve always seeded it in a way to try and control who plays in the championship, but this year was just over the top.
On top of all that, college ball causes me too much stress. Your team has to play a perfect season in order to have a hope at a decent post season, and even then you have to be in the favor of the corrupt. I only watched about a quarter of our games this year, and didn’t watch the bowl game. Instead I’ve become more interested in minor league hockey. They play so many games that you can lose a bunch without it ruining the season, and it’s funnier to watch.
Oh, you didn’t hear. Their entire first, second and third strings either opted out or went in the portal in response to them getting hosed
If the first stringers went into transfer portal for being the number FIVE team in the country, they were going to go anyway, and then FSU would still be unworthy to be in the playoff.
College football is a fuckin joke. The fact that they have the balls to form a 4 team "playoffs" and act like that's improving teams' chances of winning the title is incredible.
They should have modeled their playoffs off their own March Madness and they would have been rolling in the dough. They just can't give up the "Bowl" games though.
I think expanding to a 12 team is better because players won’t sit out when there is a chance for a title. Also think they will only allow transfers after season is over. I think it will be around in some form or fashion but honestly why not just make it a minor league for nfl or have it separate from school. Get rid of the pretense of student athletes.
Too much money to be lost. It also helps that out of everyone who plays D1 college football, only 15% of players will ever play in a single NFL game. However, from experience with friends and co-workers, an overwhelming majority of modern college players, like over 70%, believe they’ll be in that 15% who actually ever plays a game.
That, and as in that other comment, colleges would lose too much money and the NFL doesn’t wanna spend that money for a minor league that no one will watch, comparatively to the NFL.
Good point
Football in general was “worth it” when we didn’t know better and/or could appreciate the history and tradition of it, but they’ve killed it with all their marketing to women and critical-race-theory washing the fact that the players are killing each other. There’s zero reason to put your kids in the game when they can wrestle or do jiu jitsu instead. We’re a generation out from the game dying or going full 7 on 7