Another very obvious point that hasn’t been brought up yet:
The NFL plays on Sunday.
College plays on Saturday.
It’s easy to root for two teams, because they never compete against each other on the television schedule.
I prefer Aulabama, myself.
Crimson Eagle!
I honestly wonder if LSU’s football team this year could take out some of the lower ranked NFL teams. College sports at the Division IA level aren’t amateur in the least. The athletes that make those teams are chosen and groomed within an inch of their lives. That is part of the conflict between sports and academics.
One thing that hasn’t been brought up is that most athletes can’t survive in the NBA or NFL at 18 or 19 no matter how talented they are. They are at the peak of some traits but are still growing and gaining experience. Some people like watching younger people play sports as opposed to people in their 20’s and 30’s but America’s power pro-sports don’t usually let that happen.
AK84, it looks to me like we’ve answered the question you asked; the problem is that you didn’t ask what you really want to know, which is “why don’t other countries make the fuss over university athletics that the U.S. does?” The answer is that local sports teams in other countries aren’t affiliated with universities. The UK and other countries have local football clubs that inspire all manner of insanity, they’re just not university teams. In the U.S., the major sports are football, baseball, and basketball; football and basketball were more-or-less invented at colleges, and they are the major college sports. Baseball has been around a lot longer, developed among non-college attending people, and developed its farm system in the '20s and '30s – leaving minor league teams as the closest thing to local teams that baseball has, and it’s not the same.
Well, it’s not the same anymore.
Once upon a time (say, before the 1950s), minor-league baseball wasn’t primarily made up of “farm teams” (i.e., teams affiliated with a major-league team, and which serve as training teams for their major-league parent). Many minor leagues were independent; as this was before you could watch baseball on television – and in a time when the westernmost (and southernmost) teams were in St. Louis – people in much of the country were fans of their local minor-league teams. They may well have also followed major league baseball (through newspapers, radio broadcasts, etc.), but that may have been secondary to them.
Eventually, the major-league teams learned the value of having farm systems under their control, teams expanded to (or moved to) the West and South, and television made it easier to be a fan of a team not based in your town. All of that largely killed the independent minor leagues.
AK84, if you want an honest answer to the question, you’ve gotten one.
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Geography absolutely is a factor. The top 15 best attended college football teams in 2010 - look this up if you don’t believe me - are ALL, no exceptions, located in a city with no college football. Every single one. Most aren’t even within a reasonable drive of a pro team. Access to high level sports is a big deal.
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College football and basketball are the second highest levels of those pro sports, which magnifies the effect. Their popularity as opposed to the relatively limp popularity of college baseball more or less proves that point.
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Because that’s just what Americans like, and it has been that way for generations and so the media and marketing effects are self-replicating. Do not dismiss the value of “just because.”
I mean, why to people in the UK like soccer? Why is hockey the most popular sport in Canada but not in any other country? Why do Cubans and Dominicans prefer baseball to soccer, but the rest of Latin America doesn’t? Why do the Japanese love baseball but not basketball? Why do Kenyans dominate long distance running but Jamaicans dominate sprinting? Why do the USA and Australia have homegrown types of football that are major pro sports but no one else does? (Canadian football is a cousin of the American game.) Why do Indians love cricket? Why do the Chinese love table tennis? Why did baseball become insanely popular in the Far East, but not in Europe?
The answer is “because.” The answer to any one of those questions is that there’s a long string of historical, economic, geographic and business-related phenomena, stretching over generations, that led a particular sport to capture the imaginations of people. Each has its own story.
kenobi 65 notes the decline of baseball’s minor leagues. You could write an entire book just explaining that - a huge, major professional sport in which the USA really has NO particularly popular second-tier league. Why is that? It’s a really long story that gets into the drama and details of a business that’s been going since the nineteenth century.
Nope. There’s roughly a 0% chance of LSU beating the Colts.
Underline mine. Did you mean professional football at the end of that sentence? Otherwise, help a girl out on what you mean.
I would like to reiterate that **AK84 **is not British. No doubt some Brits do go on to message boards, post provocative questions, and then react in a hostile fashion to people who take the time to respond, but this is not one of those occasions.
Yes, my mistake.
Thanks.
I’m going to disagree with the bolded part. I think a large factor in the “limp” popularity of college baseball is the timing of the season. The games start in February, when much of the country still has snow on the ground. By the time it’s starting to get warm, it’s final exam time. The tournaments are in June, after most students have left for the summer.
Baseball is a summer sport, and isn’t a good fit for the typical college schedule.
This is just plain ridiculous.
What percentage of LSU players (or any of the many top teams from each year) will even play a single down in the NFL?
Let’s look at some numbers: 6 LSU players drafted in 2011 (I know, last years team, but still you get the idea) - and not all 6 are even starters.
Well this was utterly pointless, wasn’t it, and interesting that the moderator that accused me of acting in such a way recently is active in this thread and said nothing.
I know I have my opinion as to why.
Regarding the actual discussion, I have to agree that the main reason (there may be additional ones) is that college sports is the second tier of certain US sports. Remember also that there is no relegation in US sports (that I am aware of) so if you don’t live anywhere close to a top tier team then your chances of that changing are extremely small. In other countries with promotion/relegation between the tiers than this is not only common but a yearly activity.
That doesn’t contradict what I was saying at all. What I was saying is that since college teams in sports WITHOUT established professional minor leagues are very popular (i.e. football and basketball), it’s most likely because they’re the only second tier for those sports that’s worth a damn. That doesn’t mean that they’re going to be more popular than the pro teams, but rather that there are going to be a lot of fans for the college teams.
(and Pitt only drawing 15k people is freaking embarrasing… high school teams draw more than that around here)
I realize that there are going to be exceptions, but I’d say that on the whole, minor league baseball and minor league hockey are more popular than college baseball and college hockey, even if it’s really popular in the SEC.
If the US had a professional minor league football and basketball system, then the popularity of college sports might(would?) wane a little bit, especially among fans who didn’t actually go to those schools.
Good rebuttal to the idea that the teams like LSU could beat the worst NFL teams.
This sort of thing is said every year though, someone says that some dominant college team would beat [insert worst current NFL team]. Every year various writers will debunk this idea with the same arguments. And the fact is they are 100% right every time.
The best players in college football rarely are productive their first or even second years. Many of them are never productive. I actually have an LSU fan in my family who has been saying all year “this entire LSU team would start in the NFL tomorrow.” I’ve shown him that if you take all of the LSU players from the last 10 years who are in the NFL, you do not even have enough to fill a single pro roster. That’s the last 10 years, there is no way a single year’s team would have enough good players to field an NFL quality team.
There are a lot of differences between NFL players and college players. Physically, there is a difference between the training and conditioning of a college versus a pro player. In the NCAA there are even strict rules on how much you can practice, things of that nature. In the NFL everyone there has a full time job maximizing their football performance. Sure, in the NCAA it’s an open secret that every major team violates practice rules with “student lead” practice sessions and things of that nature. But even with that stuff, the time that pros put in still far exceeds the time that college players put in.
Further, the trainers, coaches, people helping the pros train and practice are the best of the best. The best assistant coaches, position coaches, they aren’t going to stay in college where the pay discrepancy is massively different from the college game. A few select college head coaches are probably capable of being really good pro coaches (especially the college head coaches with experience as NFL assistant coaches), but most of them wouldn’t. The discrepancy in pay between NFL and college head coaches also isn’t so huge, at least at the major schools. However the head coach is just one coach, the discrepancy in pay between NCAA assistants and NFL assistants is very significant and because of that the best tight ends coach, the best line coaches, the best quarterbacks coaches, those guys are on NFL payrolls. That gives those NFL players who work with them an advantage, because they’re working with the best coaches in the world at making them better at their position.
NFL defensive schemes and offensive schemes are far more complicated than the NCAA schemes. The playbooks are harder to learn, and it takes a lot more time devoted to studying. NCAA players have to balance school, strict practice limits and all that, they just do not have the time to study offense and defense the way the pros do. Pro players learn their scheme and their playbook so well most of them could probably call the plays on their side of the ball in a pinch, if they had to.
Finally, all of those guys in the NFL were college players. But on top of that they’ve got years of experience playing 16+ games a year of professional football, with years of practice and training at the pro level.
In football at most positions, you are physically capable of being very good for some years, so guys in the NFL who are say, 27-28 aren’t going to be slower or less athletic than a 18-21 year old NCAA player. But they are probably going to be stronger, tougher, and have more experience in the pro level than the NCAA player has in their college career, when you factor in those NFL guys at age 28 have been playing in the pros for 7 years AND also played for 4 years in college you see how big the experience edge favors those pro guys.
Another thing to keep in mind is the NFL is “with some flaws/exceptions” a pretty balance, 30 team league. The draft and revenue sharing work to keep all of the teams somewhat competitive, it doesn’t prevent inept management from keeping some teams perennial losers, of course.
In college there are 120+ teams with no real competitive balance at all. The closest you get is conference revenue sharing and the scholarship limit (before that was introduced big schools like Notre Dame and Michigan would intentionally recruit and offer scholarships to 100+ kids just to keep them off opponents’ rosters.)
But there is no equivalent of the draft in college, recruiting is competitive and whoever can do the best job at it gets the best kids. Doing the best job is a combination of sales along with having a prestigious program and also having a lot of money (to hire the good recruiters, give them charter planes to fly around in, and truth be told grease certain wheels against NCAA rules.) What all this goes to say is, because of the nature of the NCAA there are around 25-30 “good” football schools and 90 really bad ones who play in a different world.
Even within the BCS conferences there are several of the teams on the “outside” of that illustrious top 25-30 that field competitive teams consistently. Even in the SEC, when was the last time Kentucky or Vanderbilt was really any good? Even Mississippi State which has been doing so well their coach is being highly recruited elsewhere is only considered good because they haven’t been losing every game. In the B1G, Big XII, Pac-12 you have your Washington State’s, Iowa State’s, Northwesterns, Minnesotas etc.
What this all goes to say is the college kids from schools like LSU play about 4 really challenging games a year and about 9 games against schools that just do not play at the same level of football. Speaking of LSU they played one of the toughest schedules of any #1 team in recent memory. They still played Northwestern State and Western Kentucky–teams so bad it’d be the equivalent of an NFL team playing an arena football team or an NFL Europe team. They also played Kentucky and Ole Miss who while real Division IA schools are very, very bad. That’s 4 out of LSU’s 13 games against teams that really aren’t even in the same division of competitive football as LSU is. College players just haven’t developed the toughness of NFL players who play competitive games every game of the year, there are no cupcake IAA teams in the NFL that you have 0% chance of losing to and you can have all your starters ride the bench after halftime.
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Kentucky went to a bowl game each of the last five years. SEC bad usually isn’t bad bad.
Who wants competitive balance? NFL football is deathly boring; you have what amounts to the same 30 teams playing the same damn formations on both sides of the ball, running the same plays, and reacting the same way every down.
While there’s a lot of disparity among college teams, you have a much more dynamic and interesting game- each conference has its own predominant style of play, and each team within it has their own individual style.
You end up with shocking upsets like the So. Mississippi / UH game, or Oklahoma State/ IA state, and you occasionally end up with real snoozers (more pro-style) like LSU/Alabama earlier in the season.
It may not be balanced, but it is exciting in a way that pro football can’t hope to match.