One
The future belongs to the young and by now my view of college football is as antiquated as those sports fans who wistfully remember the Brooklyn Dodgers.
So the College Football Playoff National Championship was played this Monday, did you catch it? An average of 22.1 million viewers did. That sounds like a lot, but it represented a 12% decline from a year ago, and when compared to the top shows for 2024 would rank 54th, just behind Week 17 Sunday Night Football.
A question for FBS schools, is it worth it? Once upon a time, college football had a quirky life of regional conferences and a bowl structure that determined championships. Over the past 25+ years it has slowly rationalized to a new business model of conferences largely constructed to fill TV time slots and a playoff system that has expanded to 12 teams. It also has developed a player compensation model where a player deciding to enter the NFL draft needs to weigh whether they will make more money in college as opposed to being a second-day pick.
So the quest for more revenue has meant that while once college football finished with a crescendo on January 1st, now it’s playing its championship on January 19th, on a Monday night, in shadow of the second week of the NFL playoffs.
At what point does college football stop trying to be a pale imitation of the NFL, albeit one with marching bands?
Second
In the year 2052, during the first Barron Trump Administration…
Third
From the Athletic, a small hope for the flickering dystopia that is Britain.
“William, Prince of Wales, the next in line to the throne, asked to meet a group of Villa supporters for a midweek pint.
“It was Steve Jones, the chairman of Chasetown Football Club — a team playing in the Northern Premier League Division One West league, the eighth tier of the English football league system — who was tasked with making it all happen.
“Two days after, Jones meets up with The Athletic to recall a Wednesday afternoon like no other. Over a Bulmers cider and for 45 minutes, the prince joined eight other Villa supporters to talk all things Unai Emery, his players and their Champions League run.”
How did this all come to be?
“Once official duties were over and before returning south, a gap in his diary emerged. William, 42, realised he would have an hour and a half to kill.
An idea came to mind. An understandable one, too — what would be better than a midweek drink talking football?
So this Prince of Wales does what any normal guy would do when he has a layover, he finds a bar and talks sports. As an aside, William said he was introduced to the team by one of the royal family’s servants.
“We asked (William’s security) team how should we address him. They simply said, ‘He’s off duty, he’s here of his own time, so call him what you want, Will or William’. There was no briefing — we could talk about whatever.”
“He came in and he wasn’t surrounded by loads of security, just one of his aides,” says Johnson. “Bold as brass, he introduced himself, shook everyone’s hand and said, ‘Right, shall we have a round?’.”
Now that’s a day.
I doubt Charles spent much time in bars shooting the breeze. I also doubt that Victoria ever allowed herself to be called Vicky.
I have lost all interest in major college sports. Between the money grubbing “schools”, conferences, with players in colllege out earning graduates of those schools and transfer portals where I need to have stock ticker at home to keep track, to hell with them all.
Do all I can as an individual to not fund any of them.
Fortunately, we have some DIII schools nearby where kids play for the fun of it.
The issue with college sports isn’t the ones that make it to the pros. And realistically, your example of a late round pick has an only slightly higher chance of making a team than I do. It’s the 99% who will only make it onto an NFL field during a game if they take a job on the grounds keeping crew. They’re the ones that have spent four+ years of their life with the ever present risk of acute debilitating injury and the growing realization that they are at risk of delayed injury to have a degree, maybe, that qualifies them to push a shovel or swing a hammer.
I wonder if there’s anyone in even the asbestos encased media that can repeat the phrase “student athlete” with a straight face. We’re long past the pretense that participants in the big sports need more literacy than to tell X from O or will “graduate” with anything more except by their own initiative. Or even be allowed to, since any exposure to actually challenging material would risk the myth of “academic eligibility”.
Olivia Dunn has demonstrated the appeal of sports that don’t revolve around balls, that nubile young women in revealing costumes can attract an audience. Who knew? Intercollegiate pole dancing, anyone?
I wonder if Division I football and basketball have more or less fulfilled their Aristotelian (sorry I just finished a book on Aristotle) by becoming the money-grubbing, comp-searching orgs they were destined to be.
As a friend of mine told me, it’s not like money didn’t play a role before, that’s true but hypocrisy has a certain value in how vice pays tribute to virtue. It also provides a tether… without the tether, that connection to a higher set of standards you get race to year-to-year revenue growth
I agree with Jimmy – D III or just FCS might be the way to go
As an aside I see something similar in high schools. There seems to be a couple of hundred programs in the country that actively seek top-quality athletes. What’s going on? Where are they getting their money?
> where kids play for the fun of it
American football has too much prep, it’s not like soccer where kids could just use a rag ball and some vacant area.
> 99% who will only make it onto an NFL field during a game if they take a job on the grounds keeping crew.
It’s a terrible meat grinder. Not even counting child players, you start out with some 250 thousand high-school players per year (quick search said over 1 million total), and end up taking 0.1% into the NFL – draft is 224 plus some compensations.
How many of those school/university players take substances to “get ahead” and have bad injuries, brain damage included? And probably it’s not only the NFL pros ending up dead at 40 from it.
If you take a hard look at it, it’s child abuse and human sacrifice. Hey, Aztecs, we got a new one for you …
I think the better comparison is the Roman coliseum battles where at least their hearts were (usually) allowed to cease beating while still inside their chests. Even then a life expectation of forty years was out of the question. Pro football has been compared to Roman (bread and) circuses since at least my childhood (and I’ve almost doubled that 40 year life span). The big difference I see now is that the development path is more consuming for both the pro prospects (the .1%) and the rest who largely play only for the joy of the game. No real expectation of a college or pro career, but you might get lucky or coach.
I don’t follow pro football, but that Taylor Swift must be pretty fast.
Death6
I had some tenuous connections with some players on a college basketball team in the 60s. A second stringer was the cousin of a friend of mine. I once shot hoops with him. I was a housemate of the ex-wife of one of his teammates.
Back then, the basketball team was good, but only in its region. It never got far in the NCAA. But back then, the basketball players really were student-athletes. The basketball players mentioned above were English majors. One got a Ph,D. in Psychology from Harvard. A three-year starting center was an Electrical Engineering major. In looking at the resumes of their teammates, I noticed a fair amount became business executives. A lot of the lessons learned in basketball, such as team playing and time management/prioritizing (juggling school and the sport) and making decisions on the fly, also apply to the real world.
Nowadays, the basketball team is big time. But student athletes? Fuggedaboutit! There was a story a while back about the star on the team who had for the first time had read a book cover to cover. I doubt the guy was stupid, but basketball took up so much of his time from an early age that he had little time to do anything else.
I read an article in SI once that said that a Big Ten football player devoted 40 hours a week to his sport. Which leaves little time–or energy–for study. One occasionally reads of such football players being STEM majors. They are made of sterner stuff than I.
I was once in a Petroleum Engineering class with an All-American lineman who played 4 years or so in the NFL before the injury bug hit. He was an honor student. He probably got some breaks on handing things in late, but I don’t begrudge him for that.
BTW, that guy had muscles on muscles. Years later I met a high school teacher who told me that though he was 6’4″ and 250 lbs., he was too small to play the line in college. My father played second string center in college football in the 30s at 6′ and 160 pounds. Times change.
My theory is that within 5 years the major sports bubble is going to pop with all/part of the Power 4 conferences in football and basketball moving into its own world and operating differently than the rest – a loose affiliation with the namesake colleges.
Perhaps in the interest of keeping “March Madness” the various BB teams can come together for that in the form of the EFL Cup in England.
Not recognizing that the main cash cow sports, especially football, have to be handled differently has twisted college athletics in general out of shape and brought it to a crisis point. While having USC in the Big 10 for football
purposes makes sense from a revenue perspective, there is no reason USC Olympic sports athletes or even say women basketball need to get on a plane and fly across country to play Rutgers. Football should have been treated differently much as with Notre Dame which plays ACC except for football
In a sense large comprehensive athletic departments merely exist to provide cover for the revenue-generating sports. Given the new world of athlete compensation that may change, in a sense having to rethink the relationship of football/basketball and their college affiliation may cause a needed rethink of all college sports.
The major stumbling block are TV networks and other media outlets which need programming.. While the NFL dwarfs any other programming in terms of viewership, college sports offer steady programming in a fragmented market. That college affiliation still represents a valuable brand identity.
As much as I have enjoyed football through the years, it is like gladiatorial combat. To MCS’ point about injury, there are far too many guys int heir 40s and 50s who are lugging past football injuries, even since high school and not just head stuff. Guys slapping 50 pounds of weight onto frames with all sorts of leg injuries? I still have a great deal of mobility but I see guy shuffling around 10+ years younger and quite often they have a football injury.
There was a story a few years back about an OL from Baltimore who had retired and they were following up on his first year after football, The guy knew what lay before him and went on a crash program to take off his playing weight to prevent future health problems. He took off 80 pounds within a year, dangerous in of itself, and he doubts he will escape arthritis in at least one knee.
I watch former players doing commentary on the sports network and remark on how “shrunken” they are now they are retired. Of course they are of now normal body size.