College football is over. Well, at least what made it special.
First let’s get this out of the way. I’m a Michigan fan. I’ve been one of them all my life and have struggled with it almost every football season.
This is arguably the best time ever to be a Michigan fan. This is one of the best Michigan teams I’ve seen while watching sports, if not the best.
Still, I don’t really care. My interest in college football is at an all-time low. I still watch almost every game and I know what’s going on, but it’s not the same.
I don’t want this to wax poetic about my childhood, but can we all agree that college football was better 20 years ago?
It was still big and the dominant cultural force on Saturday, but I don’t know, everything felt more authentic. Not everything was decided entirely by TV executives, and conference games were played between schools with some history and a reasonable distance between each other.
Tradition is being shunned in favor of meaningless conference restructuring aimed solely at capturing a larger television market.
The Apple Cup (Washington vs. Washington State) and what was formerly known as the Civil War (Oregon vs. Oregon State) have all but disappeared. Colorado and Nebraska, my favorites of the old Black Fridays, have been reduced to a few games every decade.
But don’t worry. It’s been replaced by a new rivalry that’s just as exciting.
Rutgers vs. USC? Now, that’s what college football is really about.
And with the current organizational structure of college football, with rare exceptions, the only chance for a meaningful postseason is to join one of the new megaconferences. But what if you’re not bringing in a new and better TV market? Tough. Enjoy Mountain West or another Group 5 league.
To compare this to professional sports, the only NBA teams that make the playoffs every year are the Lakers, Celtics, Knicks, and Bulls.
But in the near future of college football, it’s pretty close. Just recently, a big college football pregame show pitted the same Washington State and Oregon State teams against each other. Despite being ranked 21st and 14th at the time, they were openly ignored, saying, “Who cares?” game.
And while the opinions of popular TV personalities should often be dismissed from the moment they are shared with the world, they usually become the prevailing narrative.
I know it’s popular to copy the NIL and blame it for all the problems in college football, but it’s far from the problem that people like Dabo Swinney see as problematic. I know a lot of people don’t like this because it’s “the destruction of amateurism in college sports,” but just like the Wizard of Oz, if you look behind the curtain, all the amateurism claims are just It turns out it’s a sham.
I would argue that once college football became such a huge money-making product, amateurism went out the window. However, it could still be considered an “amateur” sport because the players were not paid through a series of loopholes.
I’m all for players getting paid. There is no game without them. I don’t know about you, but watching a bunch of college presidents, football coaches, and TV executives running around and playing on a Saturday is a lot less fun than the elite athletes we see today. It seems that.
They deserve a piece of the ever-growing pie.
And don’t get me wrong, I don’t think the current NIL and transfer portal rules are perfect. It led to the concentration of power in a small number of teams and brought nuclear weapons with them as well. But I think the players who are putting their bodies at risk have the same right to improve their personal situations as you and I do. For that matter, so do the coaches in the same program.
Even if this new era of player agency is as bad as some pearl-clutchers have been made out to be, it simply doesn’t compare to the damage TV executives have done.
Ruining rivalries through endless conference realignments, cherry-picking the postseason, and blaming teams for getting caught in crossfire at every turn.
That’s just lame.
byauger@tribtoday.com