Of course this has been talked about, with teams wanting to join more lucrative conferences with bigger TV deals. I’m not a huge college football fan, just enjoying occasional casual games, so would appreciate your opinion on a few questions.
Is it true that the experience of watching college football on TV has become unpleasant? If so, why is this? (I have heard the term “unwatchable” used…)
I understand some conferences have signed big long-term deals that guarantee it’s team a share of massive revenue. But why wouldn’t this simply drive up the price of other leagues like the Pac or ACC? It’s not like every team could join any conference. Is it?
Shouldn’t athletes be able to profit from their image and likeness? What effects has this had in practice?
I enjoy watching college football, if I have it on DVR and can skip the commercials. Same for the NFL and MLB. Watching any of these live is almost “unwatchable.” Other than that, I think the games are fine.
The other conferences aren’t as good and so don’t command as much money. And currently, it is in fact like every team could join any conference. The PAC-12 just this week lost all their remaining big name teams. (This in addition to losing USC and UCLA last year.)
Your understanding isn’t correct. It’s big money at probably every single BCS school, huge money at all power 5 schools, and enormous money at a small handful of schools.
At worst, they’re revenue-neutral at most schools. At best, they supplement the philosophy department.
This. There are probably fifteen to twenty teams in college football which drive the lion’s share of fan interest (and, by extension, TV revenue), and are, generally, going to be among the best teams in the top division. With the so-far announced shifts in school alignment, all (or nearly all) of those schools are in:
A big part of what’s made televised football less watchable is the additional time added for more commercial breaks, more promotional spots read by the announcers, and just more gabbing by the announcers.
A few decades ago, college and NFL games were nearly always completed in no more than three hours; exceptions would be for particularly high-scoring games, overtime games, and if there was an injury which required stoppage of play for an extended period. Major conference college football games are now apparently running 3 1/2 hours now, and NFL games are about 3 1/4. There’s not any more action than there was in the 70s or 80s; it’s all about the revenue-generating things that are getting stuffed in there.
Tradition and nostalgia matter in football and particularly college sports. And because of local interest one assumes populous universities will still attract interest. And people bidding for broadcast rights, which includes recent ten year deals, paid five times or more what they last commanded. If you are a big university with lots of local fans and loyal alumni, and good enough to be in a named conference, won’t you still attract significant support?
Given how many big companies, non-traditional broadcasters and established TV networks might be interested, the heavy competition, is there really so little money in the middle of the pack? Isn’t there a league regulator who makes rules or pays any attention to tradition over treasure?
(In Canada even the biggest university stadia max out at 5000 people. It’s not the same here. I like our local teams but am happy to see them occasionally. We don’t really have the “Friday Night Lights” equivalent, even for hockey, even during playoffs. Of course, outdoor weather is not always mild.)
I can’t say I’ve heard the same. TV viewership is always extremely high, TV contracts are even higher. This sounds like a Yogi-ism (“no one goes to that restaurant anymore - it’s too crowded”). There are more commercials, but so does everything.
It does, until those conferences are run dry from poaching. The money available to even the worst teams makes being part of a large conference extremely lucrative.
No idea about practice, but yes - absolutely. There are coaches who are complaining about NIL’s effects on the game, but I think it’s too early to tell. The rich are going to continue getting richer - but at least the players get dealt in as well now.
All of these schools are members of the NCAA, which apparently either has no power over conference membership decisions, or chooses to not exert that power.
At both of the schools I went to, students had to pay an “athletics fee”. Why did we need to pay an athletics fee? To support the atheletics program. And why did we have to support the athletics program? Because the school needed the athletics program. And why did the school need the athletics program? Because it brought in so much money.
I was curious about “athletic fees” so did a quick Google search and found this, about North Carolina A&T and other historically Black colleges in NC::
"FEES CRITICAL TO BOTTOM LINE
Athletic fees at the five UNC System HBCUs vary by about $130. All of them are vitally important to funding scholarships, travel, facilities upkeep and salaries for coaches and staff.
“North Carolina A&T is the system, and the state’s largest HBCU at over 12,000 students. Its athletics fee is $435 per semester. That comes up to $870 per year.”
Maybe they do things differently at Ohio State or Stanford, but it sure sounds like students are paying–and paying a lot–to support athletic teams at these colleges, and that this money isn’t going to intramurals. If someone has a citation that shows something different, I would certainly be interested in seeing it.
At the relatively small Canadian university I’m familiar with, several million dollars a year are collected in these fees, for facilities that are used by a very small fraction of people at our commuter campus. Oh, and for a “building fund” that includes building a stadium for the student athletes who make up 0.81% of the student body and attract very few spectators. Many of the facilities and casual sports stuff such as intramurals require user fees on top of the mandatory. athletic/recreation fees.
No idea if this is the case at any given US school, but it does suggest cost-benefit analysis requires some deep dives into the data. And somewhere, we might want to add up the injuries and medical costs that are the “externalities” of a football program.
The question of profitability of football and men’s basketball programs is an old one. About 25 years ago I wrote a YA nonfiction book which dealt (in fairly small part) with this question, in the context of college sports in general. My memory is a bit hazy as to specifics, but the bulk of my sources said the following:
–Most people believe, and most colleges and colleges and athletic departments will tell you, that Division I college football (and basketball) programs are not only self-supporting, but profitable.
–With a few notable exceptions, they aren’t.
The upshot was that while Division I football (let’s just limit it to football for now) programs have the potential for making a lot of money, they are also incredibly costly–it takes a ton of dough to recruit, train, and transport a full-sized football team–and colleges do a fair amount of “creative accounting” to make it appear that they are coming out ahead, when they’re really not.
Sorry, no cites, and some caveats: there were a handful of sources that indeed said that the majority of Div I programs were profitable (and I did not have the expertise to evaluate these claims), the answers may depend partly on how you define “big-time” college football programs, and of course things may have changed since 1998. But the basic argument has been around for quite some time. I remember finding the not-so-profitable side of the argument compelling back then, and I wouldn’t be at all surprised to find that it’s still the case.