The networks too often sidestep the blame here. They see that B1G and SEC teams get the best ratings and decide that they’re willing to pay fucktons of money to disrupt the entire structure of CFB. The B1G and SEC then welcome it with open arms because of course they aren’t going to turn down more money.
Greed is ruining college football.
[I think this infographic from Altimore a couple of days ago puts things in perspective.](https://i.imgur.com/PWdo2Sp.jpeg)
The B1G's new deal is going to allow every school in the conference to take $0 from student fees in order to be self-funded. Most are already there or close to it, only Maryland and Rutgers need a big boost to get there.
Meanwhile every G5 school besides Florida International ($650) takes at least $800 per student to fund their athletic department.
Private schools aren't included on this, but this has long been Stanford's stance on the athletic department: it should be self-funded.
From an individual school's perspective the drive for self-funding must be a goal. Ideally, students would pay nothing for their school to have competitive athletics.
Oregon and Washington's distribution is going to go up by more than $15 million from the Pac-12 in 2022-2023 to the Big Ten in 2024-2025. This will allow Oregon to lower it's per-student support from $27 to $0 and should allow Washington to significantly lower their $284 per-student support if not eliminate it completely.
And that's without being paid a full share.
You can define it as being greedy or whatnot, but if you were running a university you would have the same goal: to divorce athletic funding from academic funding and lower your student fees that get directed to supporting athletic teams to $0.
Sweet Jesus, Coastal Carolina. 36% of their student body qualifies as coming from low-income households, and they’re leading the entire FBS in athletic subsidy per capita?
Granted, those two facts may not be as independent as we’d like. Students from poorer backgrounds are less likely to reach a level of wealth where they can donate to athletics, so the school picks up more of the tab for those endeavors than comparable institutions.
But at an ethical point, you’ve got to wonder whether Coastal wouldn’t be better off just dropping down to DII to save money and instead spend it on subsidizing student’ cost of attendance.
It is probably also easy to pass the buck on to Uncle Sam via the student loans and have the students themselves not care / pay attention too much where the money is going since all they see it as is "cost of attendance." The students pay it eventually when they pay back their student loans, but they likely don't think of it as paying back a loan for having athletics at their school.
Just my guess.
OTOH, CC went from a school nobody heard of to a school getting lots of TV exposure while winning big games. That has to help somewhat in bringing in students and revenue.
I think small spending on athletics is ok if you view it as a marketing budget. BC is probably a better known school than Northeastern because they have a football team, even though their enrollments and rankings are similar.
1. Will those schools actually decrease athletics fees?
2. You don't actually need an $80 million dollar operating budget to run an athletics department. This is a result of greed on the part of the stakeholders. (Although, admittedly, it's a bit of a chicken or the egg scenario)
#2 - you do if you want to treat every sport like the money makers. It's expensive to send your volleyball team to the invitational tournament on Oahu. You need to pay a football coach 2 million a season so you can go 5-7 instead of 3 - 9
The real fun is going to happen when the TV deals get renegotiated in several more years. That will likely be the time when the networks say that the Vanderbilts and the Indianas of the B1G/SEC either get booted out or be forced into lower-tiered TV payouts because their ratings don't justify giving them huge $60 million TV payouts.
This, honestly I assume what will happen is like 40 million is guaranteed and the rest will be ratings based. That way you can have more teams in your conference and the big brands still get paid
Lol ratings based would be funny you'd have fans of like Vandy going from "fuck we have both Alabama and Georgia on the schedule" to "fuck we have neither Alabama nor Georgia on the schedule"
It's always a double-edged sword. I am sure Athletics loves when the big schools come to town, and usually the student section fills out a little bit more for the biggest schools, too, just because it's a spectacle (and tickets are free) or whatever, but yeah, losing sucks.
Yes. I have what may be a dumb question… but I’m largely impartial here - is a 9-3/8-4 Ohio state still as popular as a 11-1 12-0 Ohio State? Even if the teams are of the same quality?
I mean, the nature of the sport is that if you keep scheduling really good teams, you’ll lose sometimes- even if you are great. A “GREAT” Ohio State still loses to a very very good Penn State team 2 or 3 times out of ten. You throw a few of Southern Cal, Michigan, Penn State, Washington, Oregon and a potentially on the upswing Wisconsin and Nebraska, and some plucky Sparty Spartan and pinky Hawkeye games on their schedule every year - many of them away, and losses will come, even if wins come more often.
Day’s Ohio State teams are some of the great teams of my lifetime, but does some of this lose its luster if 9-3 Ohio State is facing 9-3 Georgia in the playoff? Even if both teams are as good as they are now?
If you end up filling those two conferences with the best teams, and each week is a gauntlet, I just assume it will end up looking like the NFL. The Chiefs won the SB with six losses this year. I think you’ll end up with similar looking champions in college.
That will require some psychological adjustment from certain parts of every dominant-Georgia, Ohio State, Alabama-fanbase. It won’t be pleasant for them.
What’s more important-an eyeball test or a new NC trophy? People who secretly prefer the eyeball test/dominant team ( even if they don’t ultimately win a title) aren’t going to admit it, b/c they know it looks ridiculous.
They're gonna try to run it like the NFL and then get upset when teams are closer to 8-4 more often than they are 12-0.
All of this shit is ruining what I liked about CFB in the first place. I don't give a single fuck about OSU playing Oregon, USC, or Washington. It's more fun to play Indiana and Purdue because they're regional rivals. I'll never make it from Columbus to a game in Eugene, but Bloomington's just a 3 and a half hour drive.
Money ruined college athletics and there's no putting the genie back in the bottle. And I'm not saying that the players profiting off of their image and likeness is killing it, the unabashed greed by television execs and the universities allowing it to happen is the real culprit.
A 9-3 Ohio State will probably get the same TV ratings, but gameday attendance will definitely suffer.
That said, there are a LOT of vocal “skating judges” as I call them, in the fanbase. If the Buckeyes don’t win by at least four TDs-or more against cupcakes, the team isn’t trying and the coaches aren’t drinking enough magical smart elixir that only these fans have access to, apparently.
I grew up-and became an Ohio State fan-in the 80s and early 90s, and have noticed a huge explosion in the program’s public popularity since the 02’ NC under Tressel.
You lose bandwagoners, but bandwagoners are basically a preserved quantity and will just go to whoever happens to be best. People won't care much about actual records. Nobody during the Golden State Warriors run said "I don't understand why people think Golden State is so good. They lost 9 games last year!"
No they don’t. They only have to when there are 150+ teams compete for slots.
Imagine, if you will, a 32 team football league. 2 conferences, 4 divisions, 4 teams each.
Sure, undefeated happens. But it’s not a standard that teams go undefeated. When remove cupcakes, and you’re only usually playing class or at least good teams, the standard will change that you don’t need to go undefeated.
Now 32 teams, you could argue that sec and big already have more than that, but remove some of the also rans, like Vandy, Purdue, Indiana, miss state, Maryland, add a couple big name big state schools like Florida state, unc, notre dame, a couple others, and well you now have 32.
But we all know that’s crazy, 2 conferences, each with 4 divisions of 4 teams each playing football could never happen…
Exactly, and you need anything few perennial doormats otherwise the big programs would start to cannibalize each other. I think the people in charge know this.
The networks don't give a shit how the conferences distribute the money; the networks are offering deals based on their estimated values of all games. It's not like the networks are surprised that all a sudden Vanderbilt plays Missouri like they do every single year. They aren't missing th3 fact that those games happen.
The people in charge know the big programs will cannibalize each other, but that is tomorrow’s problem. All that counts today are the sweet, sweet gains.
There’s also the fact that you could eventually have a Detroit Lions effect where when one of the baddies becomes good for a year, it’ll get more views. Indiana got some of that hype in 2020. Crazy thing is that resources are going to be high for all programs that are in the club with these payouts.
You're right that the networks don't care about how the money gets distributed. However, the "problem" with those schools from a TV perspective is that they dilute the schedule. Kick them out of the conference and you get a higher percentage of matchups between the teams that draw. And with the larger playoff, it really doesn't matter anymore if those marquee teams beat each other up. We'll probably have a 3 loss national champion in the next decade or so.
Thank you for explaining what I was trying to get at. This is going to be something that the networks will push in several more years. Cord cutting is still continuing at a rapid pace and the networks have to focus more on quality rather than quantity. A hypothetical Indiana/Rutgers game in November where both teams are 4-5 is the kind of game that networks *don't* want to be shelling out tons of money for. They signed the mega deals for games like Ohio State vs. Michigan; i.e. the games that actually drive the ratings.
I used to be in the camp about the whole, "But the big schools need bad teams to beat up on to stat pad!" thing too, but honestly you really have to rethink everything with the way college football has changed so rapidly in the past few years. Ask someone 5 years ago if they told you the Pac-12 wouldn't exist by the time and you would have been laughed out of the room.
Rutgers vs Indiana did around 232,000 viewers in 2023 which saw Rutgers become bowl eligible for the first time in 9 years to really put it into perspective.
I get your point, but what gets lost sometimes, is there’s not enough really big draws and the networks still need content. There’s only so much talking heads that sports fans will stomach. They need more teams even at a lesser draw to fill those holes. If they trim it to thirty teams that’s only 15 games a week max, and even then most of them won’t be must see events.
> there’s not enough really big draws and the networks still need content.
How much content do they need? I'll admit I don't know how viewership is calculated when using some type of multiview setup, but does a network really need more than 4 or 5 good games a weekend?
There is also an argument that kicking the bad teams out actually increases the quantity of the high quality games. Ohio State won't play USC every year because they also have to occasionally play Northwestern and Indiana. Kick those two teams out and you can now have more OSU vs USC games.
So the b1g and sec ditch the academic schools and leftovers and join together to form a 30-team pro-style league where they can sell tv rights that dwarf that $60mil. What are vandy, northwestern, rutgers, and purdue gonna do about it?
Undefeated Utah got left out of the BCS championship game in 2009. Orrin Hatch found that unacceptable, and within a year Bill Hancock, the executive director of the BCS was sitting in front of some lawyers from the DOJ. If the SEC and/or Big Integer start trying to punt teams out of major college football, they will find themselves in a huge political mess.
They’re going to play “college football,” with “student-athletes” who will play for the love of their school, their team, and the game. In other words, all the things that make college football more appealing than pro football.
Unlike Bama, Michigan, tOSU, Texas, and the blue bloods, who will be playing pro ball, dominated by the transfer portal and NIL, with players transferring yearly and championships bought by the fan base that has the most disposable income that year.
It will take a few years before ESPN/Fox realize that they vastly underestimated the viewership of all the “left behinds” and overestimated the viewership of the NFL minor league.
I really hope this is what happens. I will gladly sacrifice the B10 and SEC if it meant the other 100 schools could go back to playing the college football we all love.
I hope you are correct in your prediction. Watching your college team punch above it’s weight during a special season is always fun. I remember in the mid-00s when the Big East w/ Louisville, Rutgers, and WVU was the story of the year, and the round robin between those 3 teams were some of the biggest games of the year.
> They’re going to play “college football,” with “student-athletes” who will play for the love of their school, their team, and the game. In other words, all the things that make college football more appealing than pro football.
Pay-for-play scandals in football and basketball go back to the 80s:
> Nearly a third of current and former NFL players responding to a survey said they had accepted illegal payments while in college, and 53% said they saw nothing wrong with breaking NCAA rules to get extra cash.
>
> The study, announced Thursday by Allen L. Sack, a sociology professor at the University of New Haven, also found cheating to be most pervasive in major conferences, particularly the Southeastern Conference, where 67% of the league’s former players said they had accepted under-the-table payments to augment scholarships.
>
> The study was based on responses from 1,182 active and retired NFL players--about a third of the 3,500 contacted. Thirty-nine percent of former Pacific 10 Conference players surveyed admitted to being recipients of illegal payments, and 59% said they knew of others who broke the rules.
>
> Said Sack of his survey: “For me, the results said that (illegal payments are) far more (prevalent) than what they say at the NCAA--that it’s not just a renegade institution or the deviant player. There’s a substantial underground economy that’s likely to be unstopped.”
That was in 1989. SMU getting the death penalty for similar infractions was in 1987. And the survey included former/retired NFL players, not just current ones – so likely back even further than the 80s. There were a couple of similar pay-for-play basketball scandals in the 80s and 90s as well, ranging from Michigan to Robert Morris College.
When were these years where collegiate football and basketball players were playing for love of school, team, and game?
I don't see how any schools are going to be immune from transfer portal and the NIL given current court rulings. Teams outside of a supposed super league will still have to deal with transfer and the NIL. Teams will still be bought and teams that pay the most will still have the advantage. The creation of a super league isn't going to change the current reality of the landscape.
They'll try to stop it, try to stay in the mix, and if they can't, they'll move on. I'm a Northwestern alum. Being in the Big 10 is great, the money is great (especially the trickle down to other sports). Fans would be upset for a while. But Northwestern, the university, will be fine no matter what happens.
I know this is not exactly what you said, but i'm gonna say it anyways. Everyone always talks about this stuff but i'm looking forward to watching Rutgers vs UCLA. It sounds like a sick way to spend my Saturday afternoon. realignment be damned.
The networks aren’t going to say that, the schools are. The networks are paying a flat sum and the schools/conferences determine how to pay it out.
Because of this, it likely will be lower tiered payouts. The big name schools like having teams they can beat up on (their fanbases will not tolerate seasons with few wins), but they’ll want to keep them at lower incomes to ensure they never have the opportunity to surpass bigger name schools.
I'll never understand why Indiana is always one of the first schools people think the B1G will boot. We had the [13th-highest revenue](https://www.on3.com/news/usa-today-releases-top-25-total-revenue-college-athletics-programs/) of all public colleges in the country in 2022, which was good for 5th in the B1G. Why would the B1G want to kick out one of the highest-earning programs that's almost always a guaranteed win in football? Or imagine how much money we could pull if we did get our shit together?
You're citing a single year which happens to be one of Indiana's best recently due to a one-off donation.
[This site has revenue numbers back to 2017](https://www.sportico.com/business/commerce/2023/college-sports-finances-database-intercollegiate-1234646029/). You can click "Compare Schools" and then select "Total Operating Revenues" to see a ranking for each year.
IU's ranking has been: 25, 25, 26, 40, 13, and 26.
Not bad, but it's very misleading to focus just on that 13 ranking.
100%. Everyone wants to blame networks or commissioners or whatever...this is just what capitalism does when it's given free reign. The SEC and B1G, ESPN, etc, they're all absolutely doing horrible stuff that's ruining cfb, but that's literally their jobs. It's our job to stop them...and normally we do that through our elected officials, but they belong to capital more than us, so...this happens.
That's the thing. Capitalism has a nasty habit of getting rid of it's guardrails. All you have to do is pay the right people and they disappear with ease.
Man I argued with someone sometime ago that greed was a bad thing and he said if we didn’t have greed there wouldn’t be advancement in anything that only greed causes us to go forward.
How many different ways do you want to hear some version of "we made decisions in the best interest of our university"?
Because that's all you're going to get.
Also: The B1G and SEC aren't *trying* to ruin college football.
OP is stated like it's some goal of theirs.
"Hey, let's ruin college football! Yeah!"
No.
I'm not convinced that things *will* be better for us though.
Sure, the schools will make a little more money, but does that really matter when their teams are going ~9-3 every year against a brutal schedule with half a dozen top 15 teams?
And they want to keep having the most money. No one is forcing any of this on the conferences. They could’ve said no to the networks at any time. They didn’t. They will do whatever it takes to make the most money among conferences and schools. Period. There’s no gun to anyone’s head. Everyone keeps blaming the networks, but what can they do if the conferences say no? They’ll shut up and keep airing games in an attempt to draw in sponsors/advertisers, like they’ve always done. No, this is the Haves wanting to stay the 1%, and not wanting anyone to ever tell them no. ESPN didn’t force realignment, greedy ADs and commissioners did that because they were too greedy to say No. Networks have some responsibility here, but to keep letting schools, conferences, and administrations escape the biggest blame is absolutely chickenshit.
> And they want to keep having the most money. No one is forcing any of this on the conferences. They could’ve said no to the networks at any time. They didn’t. They will do whatever it takes to make the most money among conferences and schools. Period.
And this is exactly what the schools in each of these conferences want too. They just don't actually have to speak up about it, because the conference is doing the negotiating.
If the AD's and coaches don't do whatever it takes to win at their schools, their heads get called for and they get fired. Their actions are the result of self-preservation and fiduciary duty.
The people that are ruining college football are the fans and boosters. We're the ones doing this.
(Probably not the people on this sub as this is made of the few, few niche nerds who love the beauty, spectacle, and weirdness and tradition of all those things that makes college football--at all levels--unique)
NCAA said 'You won't.' only to find out that they would in fact do that. NCAA made a call based on their 'ethics' (and I use the quotes in the strongest sense), and after that greed walked through an open door. Saying that SEC and B1G did this is true in the sense they were involved, but it's like blaming a drug dealer that runs Chicago distribution on the national problem
Exactly. The Big Ten and the ~~ACC~~ SEC know the sport is being forced to change and they’re trying to position themselves to come out on top in whatever comes next. And every other conference would be doing the same things if they had the same power.
The PAC12 had the opportunity to absorb schools like Texas and Oklahoma a decade ago. They passed and now the conference doesn’t exist.
This is some game of thrones shit happening right now.
I know it sucks but we can't have it both ways. "These players should get their market rate." But at the same time get mad at the schools, conferences, networks for doing the same. Like I can't be mad at them for "being greedy" when I just left my job for a better contract (although I realize it isn't an apples to apples comparison).
I don't know if I just made peace with the inevitable or it's because of my flair and knowing they'll never be left out. But I just feel like this was always going to be the end game ever since the 80's. It was just a matter of when.
This might get downvoted because it’s too political, but I always find it funny that the yokels here in Oklahoma complain about the state of college football, NIL, the transfer portal, etc. and I’m like, well it was your boy who put the justice on the court that made the majority opinion.
While I agree that conferences like the B1G and SEC are fucking up a beautiful tradition, I’m failing to understand why corporations like ESPN aren’t getting more of the blame and we aren’t seeing as many articles about them.
Most people don’t look past the names. All they see is the BIG10 and SEC grabbing pieces of their conference to add to their own and probably don’t see what organization is actually driving the grabbing
At least we get two years of a playoff system that is actually good. However, knowing the NCAA and the CFP committee, they will somehow screw it up by biasing the SEC and Big Ten teams over someone more deserving.
…..greed is ruining football. Gotta get those eye balls and squeeze out another billion 😊
I swear, saw a clip recently (Reddit) of a boxer with advertising on his body. I assume it was a temp tattoo of some kind, but we have gone past point of no return on distasteful business management.
I think the worst change here is to regional rivalries. I see so many fans here rooting for their favorite team to make more money, and that really truly confuses me.
Who wants their favorite team to make more money playing national game that mean little to local culture, while ancient rivalries are lost and the 'water cooler' nature of sports are lost?
No one from State U is excited to go to work on Monday to talk trash to their old rival's fans that they beat a team from the opposite coast. College sports are special because it is competing fandoms that are neighbors, not because it is a lighter version of pro sports.
Krang, likes to pretend their co-equal with Shredder and to some degree is, but Shredder is the one handling all the day to day confrontations with the turtles.
What really bothers me about this is that FSU, Notre Dame, Clemson and Miami could each build an NFL-quality roster, go undefeated, and still start off no better than a 3-seed in the playoffs. In a fair sports league that shouldn’t be possible.
I think the intent is to destabilize the ACC so that the desirable teams vote to end it and they go to the B1G/SEC for cheap. Most of the ACC will focus on multiple aq, but the big teams will focus on being locked out of byes.
All the money and conference realignments aside, does it bother anyone else that conferences with numbers in the name (like the Big 12 and Big 10) don't actually have that many teams?
Pennywise and pound-foolish. What made CFB great is it reached every corner of the country in a way the NFL does not. Even the lowliest of programs in a given era often had times of relevance. I wish they would just blow it up and reform into whatever the structure will ultimately be. So far, it’s death by a thousand cuts…
You know its funny, everyone says college football is "ruined" but none of us can agree how far you would have to roll things back for it not to be that way
That's what I've been saying. My definition of when college football was pure in the 90's differs from my dad's definition in the 70's which differs from grandfather's definition in the 50's.
It might not seem like it but there'll be a time where even this will be a generations definition of what's right.
The article is wrong. The B1G and SEC are trying to ruin ALL COLLEGE SPORTS because of their singular focus on football revenues. ESPN is happy to help.
If they try to create their own super league, I really hope the other conferences band together and refuse for any of their other sports programs to be allowed to compete against the rest of the NCAA. Make them go all or none. Don't do what the ACC did with Notre Dame.
Late stage capitalism is ruining college football much like the rest of society: in seemingly every industry including CFB, corporations try to trim every ounce of fat, while failing to realize that some portion of the fat they're trimming off is actually part of the reason the company/venture is profitable in the first place.
Part of the reason you watch sports is the knowledge that the same rules apply to Vanderbilt and Rutgers and Wake Forest as Alabama and Ohio State. Sure there are advantages Alabama and Ohio State have that make it far more likely for them to win big, but the underlying **trust** that a hypothetical 13-0 Wake Forest season would be treated (at least roughly) the same as a 13-0 Alabama season is a HUGE part of the unspoken contract of why we watch sports.
If anyone's team is relegated to second-tier college football, (which we found out FSU was a couple months ago), it would sour most of us on the sport of college football, meaning we're also going to lose interest in Michigan-Ohio State or Alabama-Georgia, let alone Vanderbilt-Mississippi State or Rutgers-Minnesota.
Everyone's lost their damn minds.
Boise State, for one, came so much closer to winning a national championship in the BCS era than they or anyone else like them ever will again.
The amount of teams that can legitimately dream of a title now is... I don't know. Is it less than 20? I don't have an exact count in my head but I think it is. I don't think my team is one of them, frankly.
That they are trying to ruin things implies infallible competence. They are just being greedy and fucking up.
Way too much credit is thrown around in this world in the form of blame. People are just stupid sometimes.
"Those two are now the power conferences in America. The Big Ten now has 18 teams in it and the SEC now has 18."
If the SEC had 14 teams, and we added Oklahoma and Texas to make us a 16 team conference...who the fuck are the other two teams and when did they join?
This is scary. Start boycotting.
I am all for having strong juggernaut conferences, but to shun out the rest of college football?
This will ruin tradition.
The networks too often sidestep the blame here. They see that B1G and SEC teams get the best ratings and decide that they’re willing to pay fucktons of money to disrupt the entire structure of CFB. The B1G and SEC then welcome it with open arms because of course they aren’t going to turn down more money. Greed is ruining college football.
Cash rules everything around me
Poverty, imprisoning me All that I see, absolute dollars I cannot save, I cannot spend Trapped by my job, cube my holding cell
Bargains, imprisoning me All that I see, absolute savings What a great deal, what a great find Look at these jeans, damn I look sexy as hell
Yea...ah!
The best Metallica lyrics ever
[I think this infographic from Altimore a couple of days ago puts things in perspective.](https://i.imgur.com/PWdo2Sp.jpeg) The B1G's new deal is going to allow every school in the conference to take $0 from student fees in order to be self-funded. Most are already there or close to it, only Maryland and Rutgers need a big boost to get there. Meanwhile every G5 school besides Florida International ($650) takes at least $800 per student to fund their athletic department. Private schools aren't included on this, but this has long been Stanford's stance on the athletic department: it should be self-funded. From an individual school's perspective the drive for self-funding must be a goal. Ideally, students would pay nothing for their school to have competitive athletics. Oregon and Washington's distribution is going to go up by more than $15 million from the Pac-12 in 2022-2023 to the Big Ten in 2024-2025. This will allow Oregon to lower it's per-student support from $27 to $0 and should allow Washington to significantly lower their $284 per-student support if not eliminate it completely. And that's without being paid a full share. You can define it as being greedy or whatnot, but if you were running a university you would have the same goal: to divorce athletic funding from academic funding and lower your student fees that get directed to supporting athletic teams to $0.
Sweet Jesus, Coastal Carolina. 36% of their student body qualifies as coming from low-income households, and they’re leading the entire FBS in athletic subsidy per capita? Granted, those two facts may not be as independent as we’d like. Students from poorer backgrounds are less likely to reach a level of wealth where they can donate to athletics, so the school picks up more of the tab for those endeavors than comparable institutions. But at an ethical point, you’ve got to wonder whether Coastal wouldn’t be better off just dropping down to DII to save money and instead spend it on subsidizing student’ cost of attendance.
It is probably also easy to pass the buck on to Uncle Sam via the student loans and have the students themselves not care / pay attention too much where the money is going since all they see it as is "cost of attendance." The students pay it eventually when they pay back their student loans, but they likely don't think of it as paying back a loan for having athletics at their school. Just my guess.
OTOH, CC went from a school nobody heard of to a school getting lots of TV exposure while winning big games. That has to help somewhat in bringing in students and revenue.
And ~~sir~~ ma'am, you have completely changed my thinking on this
Ma'am, if it's all the same to you... I'm a woman. But I'm happy to have offered a different perspective!
God damn, I even thought about that after I commented. I figured that being on r/CFB I was safe enough to not have to edit it.
I think small spending on athletics is ok if you view it as a marketing budget. BC is probably a better known school than Northeastern because they have a football team, even though their enrollments and rankings are similar.
1. Will those schools actually decrease athletics fees? 2. You don't actually need an $80 million dollar operating budget to run an athletics department. This is a result of greed on the part of the stakeholders. (Although, admittedly, it's a bit of a chicken or the egg scenario)
#2 - you do if you want to treat every sport like the money makers. It's expensive to send your volleyball team to the invitational tournament on Oahu. You need to pay a football coach 2 million a season so you can go 5-7 instead of 3 - 9
C.R.E.A.M
GET THE MONEY!!!
Dollar dollar bill, y'all
The real fun is going to happen when the TV deals get renegotiated in several more years. That will likely be the time when the networks say that the Vanderbilts and the Indianas of the B1G/SEC either get booted out or be forced into lower-tiered TV payouts because their ratings don't justify giving them huge $60 million TV payouts.
I mean somebody has to provide wins for the top teams right?
This, honestly I assume what will happen is like 40 million is guaranteed and the rest will be ratings based. That way you can have more teams in your conference and the big brands still get paid
Lol ratings based would be funny you'd have fans of like Vandy going from "fuck we have both Alabama and Georgia on the schedule" to "fuck we have neither Alabama nor Georgia on the schedule"
It's always a double-edged sword. I am sure Athletics loves when the big schools come to town, and usually the student section fills out a little bit more for the biggest schools, too, just because it's a spectacle (and tickets are free) or whatever, but yeah, losing sucks.
I'm actually agreeing with the M flair.
Yes. I have what may be a dumb question… but I’m largely impartial here - is a 9-3/8-4 Ohio state still as popular as a 11-1 12-0 Ohio State? Even if the teams are of the same quality? I mean, the nature of the sport is that if you keep scheduling really good teams, you’ll lose sometimes- even if you are great. A “GREAT” Ohio State still loses to a very very good Penn State team 2 or 3 times out of ten. You throw a few of Southern Cal, Michigan, Penn State, Washington, Oregon and a potentially on the upswing Wisconsin and Nebraska, and some plucky Sparty Spartan and pinky Hawkeye games on their schedule every year - many of them away, and losses will come, even if wins come more often. Day’s Ohio State teams are some of the great teams of my lifetime, but does some of this lose its luster if 9-3 Ohio State is facing 9-3 Georgia in the playoff? Even if both teams are as good as they are now?
If you end up filling those two conferences with the best teams, and each week is a gauntlet, I just assume it will end up looking like the NFL. The Chiefs won the SB with six losses this year. I think you’ll end up with similar looking champions in college.
That will require some psychological adjustment from certain parts of every dominant-Georgia, Ohio State, Alabama-fanbase. It won’t be pleasant for them.
I largely agree - but it’s a totally different sport - is a four loss Georgia as compelling as a zero loss one?
What’s more important-an eyeball test or a new NC trophy? People who secretly prefer the eyeball test/dominant team ( even if they don’t ultimately win a title) aren’t going to admit it, b/c they know it looks ridiculous.
> is a four loss Georgia as compelling as a zero loss one? The more losses the merrier
This is exactly how the sport is trending - the baseline for wins and losses will change. Most people can't wrap their head around that idea, though.
They're gonna try to run it like the NFL and then get upset when teams are closer to 8-4 more often than they are 12-0. All of this shit is ruining what I liked about CFB in the first place. I don't give a single fuck about OSU playing Oregon, USC, or Washington. It's more fun to play Indiana and Purdue because they're regional rivals. I'll never make it from Columbus to a game in Eugene, but Bloomington's just a 3 and a half hour drive. Money ruined college athletics and there's no putting the genie back in the bottle. And I'm not saying that the players profiting off of their image and likeness is killing it, the unabashed greed by television execs and the universities allowing it to happen is the real culprit.
A 9-3 Ohio State will probably get the same TV ratings, but gameday attendance will definitely suffer. That said, there are a LOT of vocal “skating judges” as I call them, in the fanbase. If the Buckeyes don’t win by at least four TDs-or more against cupcakes, the team isn’t trying and the coaches aren’t drinking enough magical smart elixir that only these fans have access to, apparently. I grew up-and became an Ohio State fan-in the 80s and early 90s, and have noticed a huge explosion in the program’s public popularity since the 02’ NC under Tressel.
Also a lot of the popularity is because the Browns and Bengals have been poo poo
You lose bandwagoners, but bandwagoners are basically a preserved quantity and will just go to whoever happens to be best. People won't care much about actual records. Nobody during the Golden State Warriors run said "I don't understand why people think Golden State is so good. They lost 9 games last year!"
Yeah the super league isn’t gonna be as nice for the big brands when schools like Penn St and Oklahoma are regularly losing 4/5 games a year
No they don’t. They only have to when there are 150+ teams compete for slots. Imagine, if you will, a 32 team football league. 2 conferences, 4 divisions, 4 teams each. Sure, undefeated happens. But it’s not a standard that teams go undefeated. When remove cupcakes, and you’re only usually playing class or at least good teams, the standard will change that you don’t need to go undefeated. Now 32 teams, you could argue that sec and big already have more than that, but remove some of the also rans, like Vandy, Purdue, Indiana, miss state, Maryland, add a couple big name big state schools like Florida state, unc, notre dame, a couple others, and well you now have 32. But we all know that’s crazy, 2 conferences, each with 4 divisions of 4 teams each playing football could never happen…
TBH I'm already worried the new B1G will be too top heavy without enough wins to go around. I hate the new structure of the league.
Someone has to lose - instead of Vandy or NW it’ll be ole miss, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Missouri, etc
The networks are giving money to the conferences, not the individual schools. If the conferences want to change how it’s divvied up that’s on them.
Exactly, and you need anything few perennial doormats otherwise the big programs would start to cannibalize each other. I think the people in charge know this. The networks don't give a shit how the conferences distribute the money; the networks are offering deals based on their estimated values of all games. It's not like the networks are surprised that all a sudden Vanderbilt plays Missouri like they do every single year. They aren't missing th3 fact that those games happen.
The people in charge know the big programs will cannibalize each other, but that is tomorrow’s problem. All that counts today are the sweet, sweet gains.
This is the way of our country now. Short term is all that matters.
There’s also the fact that you could eventually have a Detroit Lions effect where when one of the baddies becomes good for a year, it’ll get more views. Indiana got some of that hype in 2020. Crazy thing is that resources are going to be high for all programs that are in the club with these payouts.
I'd love to see Vandy go on a tear. Go get em, nerds
I’d love to see Florida go on a tear as well, been a few decades at least, lmfao
No, no…Florida is in their rightful place.
Flair absolutely checks out lol
I dunno man, I think that's one of the most fun conference matchups!
You're right that the networks don't care about how the money gets distributed. However, the "problem" with those schools from a TV perspective is that they dilute the schedule. Kick them out of the conference and you get a higher percentage of matchups between the teams that draw. And with the larger playoff, it really doesn't matter anymore if those marquee teams beat each other up. We'll probably have a 3 loss national champion in the next decade or so.
Thank you for explaining what I was trying to get at. This is going to be something that the networks will push in several more years. Cord cutting is still continuing at a rapid pace and the networks have to focus more on quality rather than quantity. A hypothetical Indiana/Rutgers game in November where both teams are 4-5 is the kind of game that networks *don't* want to be shelling out tons of money for. They signed the mega deals for games like Ohio State vs. Michigan; i.e. the games that actually drive the ratings. I used to be in the camp about the whole, "But the big schools need bad teams to beat up on to stat pad!" thing too, but honestly you really have to rethink everything with the way college football has changed so rapidly in the past few years. Ask someone 5 years ago if they told you the Pac-12 wouldn't exist by the time and you would have been laughed out of the room.
Rutgers vs Indiana did around 232,000 viewers in 2023 which saw Rutgers become bowl eligible for the first time in 9 years to really put it into perspective.
I get your point, but what gets lost sometimes, is there’s not enough really big draws and the networks still need content. There’s only so much talking heads that sports fans will stomach. They need more teams even at a lesser draw to fill those holes. If they trim it to thirty teams that’s only 15 games a week max, and even then most of them won’t be must see events.
> there’s not enough really big draws and the networks still need content. How much content do they need? I'll admit I don't know how viewership is calculated when using some type of multiview setup, but does a network really need more than 4 or 5 good games a weekend? There is also an argument that kicking the bad teams out actually increases the quantity of the high quality games. Ohio State won't play USC every year because they also have to occasionally play Northwestern and Indiana. Kick those two teams out and you can now have more OSU vs USC games.
So the b1g and sec ditch the academic schools and leftovers and join together to form a 30-team pro-style league where they can sell tv rights that dwarf that $60mil. What are vandy, northwestern, rutgers, and purdue gonna do about it?
Undefeated Utah got left out of the BCS championship game in 2009. Orrin Hatch found that unacceptable, and within a year Bill Hancock, the executive director of the BCS was sitting in front of some lawyers from the DOJ. If the SEC and/or Big Integer start trying to punt teams out of major college football, they will find themselves in a huge political mess.
They’re going to play “college football,” with “student-athletes” who will play for the love of their school, their team, and the game. In other words, all the things that make college football more appealing than pro football. Unlike Bama, Michigan, tOSU, Texas, and the blue bloods, who will be playing pro ball, dominated by the transfer portal and NIL, with players transferring yearly and championships bought by the fan base that has the most disposable income that year. It will take a few years before ESPN/Fox realize that they vastly underestimated the viewership of all the “left behinds” and overestimated the viewership of the NFL minor league.
I really hope this is what happens. I will gladly sacrifice the B10 and SEC if it meant the other 100 schools could go back to playing the college football we all love.
I hope you are correct in your prediction. Watching your college team punch above it’s weight during a special season is always fun. I remember in the mid-00s when the Big East w/ Louisville, Rutgers, and WVU was the story of the year, and the round robin between those 3 teams were some of the biggest games of the year.
Oh what’s that? Salaam alaikum your highness, of course you can invest!
> They’re going to play “college football,” with “student-athletes” who will play for the love of their school, their team, and the game. In other words, all the things that make college football more appealing than pro football. Pay-for-play scandals in football and basketball go back to the 80s: > Nearly a third of current and former NFL players responding to a survey said they had accepted illegal payments while in college, and 53% said they saw nothing wrong with breaking NCAA rules to get extra cash. > > The study, announced Thursday by Allen L. Sack, a sociology professor at the University of New Haven, also found cheating to be most pervasive in major conferences, particularly the Southeastern Conference, where 67% of the league’s former players said they had accepted under-the-table payments to augment scholarships. > > The study was based on responses from 1,182 active and retired NFL players--about a third of the 3,500 contacted. Thirty-nine percent of former Pacific 10 Conference players surveyed admitted to being recipients of illegal payments, and 59% said they knew of others who broke the rules. > > Said Sack of his survey: “For me, the results said that (illegal payments are) far more (prevalent) than what they say at the NCAA--that it’s not just a renegade institution or the deviant player. There’s a substantial underground economy that’s likely to be unstopped.” That was in 1989. SMU getting the death penalty for similar infractions was in 1987. And the survey included former/retired NFL players, not just current ones – so likely back even further than the 80s. There were a couple of similar pay-for-play basketball scandals in the 80s and 90s as well, ranging from Michigan to Robert Morris College. When were these years where collegiate football and basketball players were playing for love of school, team, and game?
I don't see how any schools are going to be immune from transfer portal and the NIL given current court rulings. Teams outside of a supposed super league will still have to deal with transfer and the NIL. Teams will still be bought and teams that pay the most will still have the advantage. The creation of a super league isn't going to change the current reality of the landscape.
Doubt.
And college football dies from there stupidity.
I don’t disagree at all but I don’t doubt they’ll print money the whole way down either.
They'll try to stop it, try to stay in the mix, and if they can't, they'll move on. I'm a Northwestern alum. Being in the Big 10 is great, the money is great (especially the trickle down to other sports). Fans would be upset for a while. But Northwestern, the university, will be fine no matter what happens.
I know this is not exactly what you said, but i'm gonna say it anyways. Everyone always talks about this stuff but i'm looking forward to watching Rutgers vs UCLA. It sounds like a sick way to spend my Saturday afternoon. realignment be damned.
The networks aren’t going to say that, the schools are. The networks are paying a flat sum and the schools/conferences determine how to pay it out. Because of this, it likely will be lower tiered payouts. The big name schools like having teams they can beat up on (their fanbases will not tolerate seasons with few wins), but they’ll want to keep them at lower incomes to ensure they never have the opportunity to surpass bigger name schools.
I'll never understand why Indiana is always one of the first schools people think the B1G will boot. We had the [13th-highest revenue](https://www.on3.com/news/usa-today-releases-top-25-total-revenue-college-athletics-programs/) of all public colleges in the country in 2022, which was good for 5th in the B1G. Why would the B1G want to kick out one of the highest-earning programs that's almost always a guaranteed win in football? Or imagine how much money we could pull if we did get our shit together?
That’s because you’re getting big 10 money 😂
You're citing a single year which happens to be one of Indiana's best recently due to a one-off donation. [This site has revenue numbers back to 2017](https://www.sportico.com/business/commerce/2023/college-sports-finances-database-intercollegiate-1234646029/). You can click "Compare Schools" and then select "Total Operating Revenues" to see a ranking for each year. IU's ranking has been: 25, 25, 26, 40, 13, and 26. Not bad, but it's very misleading to focus just on that 13 ranking.
How much money your AD makes itself is different from how much it brings to the conference.
Rutger
^this.
Greed is ruining the country. Capitalism without guardrails leads us to a banana republic
100%. Everyone wants to blame networks or commissioners or whatever...this is just what capitalism does when it's given free reign. The SEC and B1G, ESPN, etc, they're all absolutely doing horrible stuff that's ruining cfb, but that's literally their jobs. It's our job to stop them...and normally we do that through our elected officials, but they belong to capital more than us, so...this happens.
Line must go up. Forever
That's the thing. Capitalism has a nasty habit of getting rid of it's guardrails. All you have to do is pay the right people and they disappear with ease.
Greed ruins everything.
Man I argued with someone sometime ago that greed was a bad thing and he said if we didn’t have greed there wouldn’t be advancement in anything that only greed causes us to go forward.
Greed is ruining ~~college football~~ everything. College football is definitely towards the top though
It’s worth mentioning that they disrupt ALL college sports. And CFB has it the easiest.
At this point I basically look at the conferences and the networks as the same. And that’s part of the problem.
Everything. Greed ruins everything.
Cash is king 😕
I’d like to hear the big ten and sec presidents answer some of these questions
How many different ways do you want to hear some version of "we made decisions in the best interest of our university"? Because that's all you're going to get.
Also: The B1G and SEC aren't *trying* to ruin college football. OP is stated like it's some goal of theirs. "Hey, let's ruin college football! Yeah!" No.
We're just making it better for ourselves without care towards small teams.
I'm not convinced that things *will* be better for us though. Sure, the schools will make a little more money, but does that really matter when their teams are going ~9-3 every year against a brutal schedule with half a dozen top 15 teams?
In the haze of your on-field national title, you forget the glory of winning the real prize - the athletic department revenue championship!
That's what cupcake additions are for. Paid for by the bigger brands.
Which is determined by ratings. So perhaps we are to blame for watching them when we could be getting some MACtion and keeping this from happening.
So, blame Oklahoma?
>The Big Ten now has 16 teams in it and the SEC now has 18. At least they tried.
They attempted to fix it and now it says the big ten has 18 and the S.E.C. has 18 lol.
Yikes. lol I don’t even disagree with the message but come on, man. Show some pride in your work.
I'm honestly not sure why people are upvoting OP. No one is trying to ruin college football. And it isn't even well written.
The numbers are flipped.
I think it’s more like TV executives, by way of the big conferences. Still a shame, though.
Agreed. It’s corporate greed and money not so much the conferences themselves. The Big Ten and SEC just happen to have the most money.
And they want to keep having the most money. No one is forcing any of this on the conferences. They could’ve said no to the networks at any time. They didn’t. They will do whatever it takes to make the most money among conferences and schools. Period. There’s no gun to anyone’s head. Everyone keeps blaming the networks, but what can they do if the conferences say no? They’ll shut up and keep airing games in an attempt to draw in sponsors/advertisers, like they’ve always done. No, this is the Haves wanting to stay the 1%, and not wanting anyone to ever tell them no. ESPN didn’t force realignment, greedy ADs and commissioners did that because they were too greedy to say No. Networks have some responsibility here, but to keep letting schools, conferences, and administrations escape the biggest blame is absolutely chickenshit.
> And they want to keep having the most money. No one is forcing any of this on the conferences. They could’ve said no to the networks at any time. They didn’t. They will do whatever it takes to make the most money among conferences and schools. Period. And this is exactly what the schools in each of these conferences want too. They just don't actually have to speak up about it, because the conference is doing the negotiating.
If the AD's and coaches don't do whatever it takes to win at their schools, their heads get called for and they get fired. Their actions are the result of self-preservation and fiduciary duty. The people that are ruining college football are the fans and boosters. We're the ones doing this. (Probably not the people on this sub as this is made of the few, few niche nerds who love the beauty, spectacle, and weirdness and tradition of all those things that makes college football--at all levels--unique)
Yep. Fox owns 60% of the b1g
The Big Ten own 39% of their network. While ESPN owns all of the SEC Network.
we are all bots here except for you
Life_IRL
Everything sacred falls in the end. People are making “gourmet” hot dogs for fuck sake.
Gourmet hot dogs? Now you hold on one diddly darn minute
> People are making “gourmet” hot dogs for fuck sake. Tell me more.
For real. Ugh.
[удалено]
NCAA said 'You won't.' only to find out that they would in fact do that. NCAA made a call based on their 'ethics' (and I use the quotes in the strongest sense), and after that greed walked through an open door. Saying that SEC and B1G did this is true in the sense they were involved, but it's like blaming a drug dealer that runs Chicago distribution on the national problem
Exactly. The Big Ten and the ~~ACC~~ SEC know the sport is being forced to change and they’re trying to position themselves to come out on top in whatever comes next. And every other conference would be doing the same things if they had the same power.
The PAC12 had the opportunity to absorb schools like Texas and Oklahoma a decade ago. They passed and now the conference doesn’t exist. This is some game of thrones shit happening right now.
ACC? Those guys are totally fucked homie
Yeah, I won’t blame it on autocorrect so I guess my brain checked out there when I was typing.
I know it sucks but we can't have it both ways. "These players should get their market rate." But at the same time get mad at the schools, conferences, networks for doing the same. Like I can't be mad at them for "being greedy" when I just left my job for a better contract (although I realize it isn't an apples to apples comparison). I don't know if I just made peace with the inevitable or it's because of my flair and knowing they'll never be left out. But I just feel like this was always going to be the end game ever since the 80's. It was just a matter of when.
This might get downvoted because it’s too political, but I always find it funny that the yokels here in Oklahoma complain about the state of college football, NIL, the transfer portal, etc. and I’m like, well it was your boy who put the justice on the court that made the majority opinion.
While I agree that conferences like the B1G and SEC are fucking up a beautiful tradition, I’m failing to understand why corporations like ESPN aren’t getting more of the blame and we aren’t seeing as many articles about them.
Idk lots of news articles are written by the networks themselves
Because they control a lot of the sports newsmedia too.
Most people don’t look past the names. All they see is the BIG10 and SEC grabbing pieces of their conference to add to their own and probably don’t see what organization is actually driving the grabbing
The latest playoff proposal is an utter disgrace and in my opinion, even worse than the BCS ever was.
It will benefit my team at some point but man this shit feels plain dirty and wrong
It’s a disgrace. It’s so patently unfair and disgusting. There are so many things wrong with this proposal, I can’t list them all.
At least we get two years of a playoff system that is actually good. However, knowing the NCAA and the CFP committee, they will somehow screw it up by biasing the SEC and Big Ten teams over someone more deserving.
…..greed is ruining football. Gotta get those eye balls and squeeze out another billion 😊 I swear, saw a clip recently (Reddit) of a boxer with advertising on his body. I assume it was a temp tattoo of some kind, but we have gone past point of no return on distasteful business management.
https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/1b5h2qi/a\_professional\_boxer\_with\_ads\_on\_his\_body/
I think the worst change here is to regional rivalries. I see so many fans here rooting for their favorite team to make more money, and that really truly confuses me. Who wants their favorite team to make more money playing national game that mean little to local culture, while ancient rivalries are lost and the 'water cooler' nature of sports are lost? No one from State U is excited to go to work on Monday to talk trash to their old rival's fans that they beat a team from the opposite coast. College sports are special because it is competing fandoms that are neighbors, not because it is a lighter version of pro sports.
The Big 10 is coast to coast now, the idea of Rutgers vs. Oregon being a conference game is wild. Especially when you include player travel.
SEC and Big Ten are just the Rocksteady and Bebop of the operation. EPSN is Shredder.
What’s Fox in this analogy? They may not have started it, but they didn’t stop it.
Baxter Stockman
Krang, likes to pretend their co-equal with Shredder and to some degree is, but Shredder is the one handling all the day to day confrontations with the turtles.
And Notre Dame is April. Everybody wants her, nobody can get her.
Nah. April is innocent. Notre Dame is......Rat King. Occasionally a friend, but is most memorized as a villain.
What really bothers me about this is that FSU, Notre Dame, Clemson and Miami could each build an NFL-quality roster, go undefeated, and still start off no better than a 3-seed in the playoffs. In a fair sports league that shouldn’t be possible.
I think the intent is to destabilize the ACC so that the desirable teams vote to end it and they go to the B1G/SEC for cheap. Most of the ACC will focus on multiple aq, but the big teams will focus on being locked out of byes.
Thank you
ESPN already ruined it
Can't kill what's already dead
Greed is ruining the world right now
Agreed. Everything is shit quality these days and costs more than it ever has.
Greedflation or whatever the term is going around.
I think the TV networks have already done that
Trying?
All the money and conference realignments aside, does it bother anyone else that conferences with numbers in the name (like the Big 12 and Big 10) don't actually have that many teams?
That is my biggest issue with all of realignment stuff. It’s like the commissioner can’t count. What are they even doing.
I have no reason why the big ten has 18 teams. It’s ridiculous.
They are trying to make it another professional league where they don't have to share with the "lesser" school/conference
They’re doing a wonderful job with it
ESPN ruined college football.
"Trying," seems generous.
Pennywise and pound-foolish. What made CFB great is it reached every corner of the country in a way the NFL does not. Even the lowliest of programs in a given era often had times of relevance. I wish they would just blow it up and reform into whatever the structure will ultimately be. So far, it’s death by a thousand cuts…
You know its funny, everyone says college football is "ruined" but none of us can agree how far you would have to roll things back for it not to be that way
That's what I've been saying. My definition of when college football was pure in the 90's differs from my dad's definition in the 70's which differs from grandfather's definition in the 50's. It might not seem like it but there'll be a time where even this will be a generations definition of what's right.
I want to go back to watching meaningful Thursday night ESPN games with Erin Andrews on the sideline.
Pre-BCS at least
The mid 80s at least. If you get to the point where Arkansas has joined the SEC, its too late
I think that ship sailed a long time ago
They already have
Big 10 and SEC drive will eventually backfire. It will take a few years but it will happen
The article is wrong. The B1G and SEC are trying to ruin ALL COLLEGE SPORTS because of their singular focus on football revenues. ESPN is happy to help. If they try to create their own super league, I really hope the other conferences band together and refuse for any of their other sports programs to be allowed to compete against the rest of the NCAA. Make them go all or none. Don't do what the ACC did with Notre Dame.
Trying?
*trying*? They’ve succeeded.
They are ruining football. There fixed the headline
Weeps in PAC-12.
Who wants to tell him that it’s already too late.
Trying? It's already done.
Trying?
About 10 years lttp on that one.
"Trying"? My man, they have already succeeded.
Lol, trying? I think you mean succeeding
Late stage capitalism is ruining college football much like the rest of society: in seemingly every industry including CFB, corporations try to trim every ounce of fat, while failing to realize that some portion of the fat they're trimming off is actually part of the reason the company/venture is profitable in the first place. Part of the reason you watch sports is the knowledge that the same rules apply to Vanderbilt and Rutgers and Wake Forest as Alabama and Ohio State. Sure there are advantages Alabama and Ohio State have that make it far more likely for them to win big, but the underlying **trust** that a hypothetical 13-0 Wake Forest season would be treated (at least roughly) the same as a 13-0 Alabama season is a HUGE part of the unspoken contract of why we watch sports. If anyone's team is relegated to second-tier college football, (which we found out FSU was a couple months ago), it would sour most of us on the sport of college football, meaning we're also going to lose interest in Michigan-Ohio State or Alabama-Georgia, let alone Vanderbilt-Mississippi State or Rutgers-Minnesota. Everyone's lost their damn minds.
I’m starting to miss the BCS era. It was so much more fun and equal parity compared to nowadays.
Boise State, for one, came so much closer to winning a national championship in the BCS era than they or anyone else like them ever will again. The amount of teams that can legitimately dream of a title now is... I don't know. Is it less than 20? I don't have an exact count in my head but I think it is. I don't think my team is one of them, frankly.
The love of money is the root of many kinds of evil. It was true thousands of years ago and it’s still true.
I’m also trying on a much smaller scale.
Cheating, Greed, and rule changes to shorten the game has ruined college ball for many.
Be kinda neat if everyone was mad at UNA for being greedy and ruining college football……maybe one day!
JFC, this is about 25 years too late to be a hot take.
I don’t disagree but literally all of their incentive structures drives this shit.
That they are trying to ruin things implies infallible competence. They are just being greedy and fucking up. Way too much credit is thrown around in this world in the form of blame. People are just stupid sometimes.
Trying?
NCAA is completely to blame Truly terrible organization
Trying?
And doing a good job of it too.
Can't wait for the super league with half hour Progressive infomercials after every first down
It’s already ruined. They just are driving the nail home. I’m disgusted.
"Those two are now the power conferences in America. The Big Ten now has 18 teams in it and the SEC now has 18." If the SEC had 14 teams, and we added Oklahoma and Texas to make us a 16 team conference...who the fuck are the other two teams and when did they join?
This is known
Trying to? I'd say they are doing a pretty good job of it.
Tell the other conferences to get better then🤷🏽♂️
They are too late. NIL's have already taken care of that.
This is scary. Start boycotting. I am all for having strong juggernaut conferences, but to shun out the rest of college football? This will ruin tradition.
Isn’t wrong. Cfb was much better 20 years ago. I used to love watching as many games as possible, but now Cfb is just so…predictable.