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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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.