Are College and NFL Football Becoming Oversaturated?

The Game Room
1

I get that this week the draft happens, so maybe this isn’t the best time to bring it up, but I, for one, am getting awfully tired of hearing about football all year long.

I know that football gets great TV ratings, but that is because it is a perfect TV event. One game a week, on the weekends when most people are home and people want to relax and be entertained. It seems that there can be too much of a good thing. ESPN still runs NFL Today every day and the season’s been over for two months already. All the conference networks (B1G, PAC-12, SEC) are constantly running old games, and now they are covering spring games, which are glorified practices.

The draft is a big event, but last week there was wall-to-wall coverage of next year’s schedules! Who cares? You’ve got the NBA and NHL playoffs going on and baseball is in full swing, but the vast majority of what is talked about on TV and radio is football. I can’t turn the channel fast enough if I hear guys talking about football.

Sometimes you just need to take a break. You can kill the golden goose if you make it lay too many eggs.

2

They wouldn’t broadcast if there weren’t demand. Shows are expensive to produce, after all, and they don’t talk about things their viewers or listeners don’t care about.

3

Personally, I’m a long way from my saturation point concerning anything football (NFL, College, High School).

4

Football is incredibly, insanely popular. I’m not sure it even has a “saturation point”. If it does we are nowhere near reaching it.

You mention the college sports networks. I remember when the Big Ten created the Big Ten Network, and it was mocked. “What are they going to run all week?” “Who’s going to watch this crap? All the good games are already on ESPN.”

Instead the Big Ten Network became a license to print money, and it was imitated by every other conference, and it revolutionized college sports (not necessarily in a good way), driving a fever of conference expansion to maximize “footprint”.

All because of football. Football, football, football. People can’t get enough of it. You could broadcast Pop Warner games at 4:00 on Thursday morning and probably make money.

5

Ha! I wish. Thanks to Texa$ firing up their own school-specific Longhorn Network, the Big 12 is woefully behind the times with any kind of conference-wide TV network. Finally last season they had agreements with Fox and ESPN so all the conference football games actually made it to TV (and not only on a six-digit satellite channel somewhere). Heck, as late as 2014, we couldn’t see Big 12 conference tournament basketball games on TV, and one of our state universities is IN the Big 12 (and even won the tournament!).

Sorry, off-topic rant. I agree with your point entirely - football (and specifically football on TV) is driving the college sports gravy train right now.

6

I agree that there’s a high degree of oversaturation going on with football. From the 40 (or whatever it is, now) college bowl games (many of which involve teams whose record is just barely above 0.500) and televised spring games (which, as the OP stated, are little more than glorified scrimmages), to the, as the OP stated, almost non-stop talk about the N.F.L. year-round it’s getting to be too much. So much so that I’ve lost my taste for college 'ball. For several years I was more “into” college football than the pros but now that’s changed. For me right now the N.F.L. takes priority but not to the point that I want to hear or read about it 365 days of the year!

7

42 plus the championship game - College Football Bowl Schedule | 2024 | FBSchedules.com

8

NFL coaches and execs always looked upon football as a year-round, 18 hour plus a day endeavor. Now a segment of the watching public wants to be a witness to and weigh in on that action as well. Especially with the explosion of popularity in fantasy leagues, there’s a market now for any and all information on players, teams, owners, trades, rule changes, etc.

I agree that it can be too much and other sports should provide some variety but admittedly nearly every day all year long one of the apps I consistently read during breakfast or lunch at work is NFL Mobile.

9

The local radio jocks talked about spring football game attendance for various universities for like 2 days straight. It was torture. And now all we hear about all day is Marcus Mariota, a guy who is probably a 2nd round pick in a decent draft.

Hello guys, the NBA playoffs are happening now. MLB is swinging into full gear. I like football, but yes, it’s taking over my sports media.

10

That’s the way I feel, too. I don’t watch any of the talking heads shows on TV or listen to sports radio anymore because of the massive amount of irrelevant football coverage. There’s a lot of assuming that this is what people want, but it is a fairly new thing and oversaturation can be a real problem. Remember when Survivor came out and suddenly every had to have a reality series or three and the TV market quickly became oversaturated and the and many series didn’t make past year one, and some didn’t even make it through one season. Fox pent a huge amount of money on a reality series last year that only made it six episodes or so.

These huge contracts that the conference networks are getting aren’t a sure thing for the future. They can charge a huge amount for the programming because of how many subscribers get the channel. That’s why the B1G picked up Rutgers and Maryland. Two huge TV markets. But the cable/satellite companies are starting to push back, saying “You want to charge us for all these suscribers in DC and New York, but nobody there watches college football!” Not to mention that ratings probably drop by 50% after football is over and by another 90% after basketball is done.

Some companies want to only pay for people actually watching, and the move to a la carte subscribing (only paying for the channels you want) is gaining steam.

11

My brother actually wrote to one of the sports-talk radio stations a few years ago, complaining about off-season football chatter while other sports were actually, like, playing games. They wrote back and said, we hear you bro, but any time we don’t talk football we lose way too much of our audience.

12

The other thing that hasn’t been mentioned yet is the popularity of fantasy football leagues, not to mention the gambling sites like fanduel.

Honestly, I think many people are addicted to football. When you add a money element into it, like a fanduel model, it becomes a gambling addiction.

For me, I made a decision to stop playing fantasy football about 4-5 years ago, and it was the best decision I ever made. I have a personality that drives me to win, and even if I try not to care, I can’t help it. I’d be making roster moves whenever I could.

I stopped for a while, and didn’t miss it too much… The first league I was in was just a group of guys who didn’t have the internet. The game was much easier to manage, and the stats were much easier to follow. Game scores would be like regular NFL games, where you’d see scores like 30-24. No fractions, no 169.76-156.45 scores.

That first league faded, and then we started up again with the Yahoo! leagues. That turned into two leagues, and then three. I couldn’t get enough information. I found myself reading anything and everything, and I wasn’t even working for real money, like the fanduel type sites are… I just wanted to win.

And then, I had a moment of clarity, and quit cold-turkey. It was the best decision I could have made for myself. My interest in football has dipped considerably, and to be honest, I don’t miss it much at all.

I still watch the draft when I can, and I watch the Super Bowl, but there are weeks when I don’t even turn on the NFL. I think ESPN and their high school fanboy approach really doesn’t connect with me, and they dominate the NFL landscape now, so it isn’t too hard for me to stay away. Even if they don’t broadcast every game, they set the tone for pre-game shows, and production. Everyone else tries to copy them. This is where my personal over-saturation tipped me over the edge.

I love the Steelers, but I no longer live and die with them. And I don’t want to.

As to the OP, I don’t think we’ve seen the global tipping point yet. People can’t get enough of it, and as other folks have mentioned, the college networks are running games all the time, and those networks are making money. Football is a money factory.

If I could figure out a way to make a lot of money in football, and it was my full-time job, I could throw myself back into it. But that’s not happening unless some genie grants me a wish to own my own team.

Honestly, now that I am out of the fantasy football world, I don’t miss it much at all. Nothing is greater to me than having an entire weekend to do what I want, and I am not tied to a TV or the internet, constantly checking scores, and seeing if my players were producing. Last season I missed the entire weekend and didn’t even get scores until Monday!

Try it… It’s as hard as quitting smoking, I think. :smiley:

13

pretty amazing that a sport is so big when 90% of the game people are standing around doing nothing.

14

I’ve predicted many times that football would overexpand and become oversaturated.

And I haven’t been right yet. So, I’m done making such predictions.

15

Running a cable network and getting it hosted by the main carriers is a license to print money. BTN is subsidized by all the cable customers whether they watch a reply of the 2007 Iowa/Wisconsin game or not, no matter what its ratings are.

16

It depends on what level it’s on. If it’s on the “you only get this with Showtime or if you pay extra for our Sports Package that includes NFL Red Zone” level, then BTN only gets money based on the number of people that have that level.

Now you know why the smaller networks are against “a la carte cable” (where you can pick, and pay for, just the channels you want); without the guaranteed money from cable “packages,” most of them would be out of business by now. But this is another topic for another folder…

17

I know I’m damn sick of hearing about deflated footballs. I’ll be in England for ten days so at least I’ll get a brief reprieve