Ever since that last round of conference realignment I have been screaming that the spread out conference structure would never last for non P5 schools. College sports NEEDS rivalries to thrive. At some point…the non-P5 schools will have to realign geographically again (that’s how all conferences began in the first place). To save money from travel and to make more money from drawing more fans from regional rivalries.
The TV contracts and exposure makes that less relevant for P5 schools.
But schools without the TV contracts and exposure needs attendance to make money. The best way to increase attendance is to play against teams that all fans can easily travel to…and against those local/regional teams the fan bases care about beating and hate losing to.
Expanding the CFP and opening it to actual G5 participation is the path to save CFB. Like everything else, we won’t realize it til too late. The current system is stifling the sport, and it will wither and die if changes are not made. You can’t keep the interest of the nation if only 6-8 programs are viable.
Realignment, the gap between the G5 and P5, the gap between the top tier schools and the rest of the teams, TV commercial greed are all contributing to this.
A huge challenge is the current kids in school and those behind them just don’t care as much about sports. It isn’t WiFi in stadiums it isn’t winning it isn’t game length it isn’t TV, they just don’t care.
Isn’t just kids, adults are getting sports fatigue. It’s on constantly, everywhere. It’s just white noise to me now. I watched exactly 0 college football games this year year that weren’t our own and have watched zero basketball games that we did not participate in. I used to watch dozens each year. Now I simply don’t care.
I agree with NWA. Every sport out there not the MLS (because it’s still mostly new) is struggling getting the new 18-34 age group interested in their product. The NBA, NHL, and NFL are holding close to steady in attendance, but it is taking millions of dollars more to pull that off compared to before, and if their executives are honest, they don’t like projections in their US popularity because they know their fighting upstream.
Let’s face it, we all see it, that entertainment as a whole continues to shift big time as well to attract this demo like never before.
Here is the future of “sports” and where the younger men/women or boys/girls are moving to. This is 100% the cause of the decline of stick and ball sports. With Esports people can compete regardless of physical attributes.
I think adults becoming less interested is something that has always happened. You get older and other things take precedence. Work, family, kids, other hobbies. The problem is though as those folks leave they aren’t being back filled by new young fans. There is just a void being created. The real reckoning is about 10 years off IMO.
I did have a chat with Fuller and he said a big threat to college sports is the rise in online universities. While they have been around for years he mentioned that your first really large group of graduates are hitting key leadership positions in companies and they do not harbor the negative view of an online degree that previous managers and leaders did. With the rising costs of Traditional schools and that you can get an online degree cheaper and faster and still find employment will put significant strain on Collegeb budgets and could significantly disrupt the college sports model with both fan interest and student fees. He said there are a lot of ADs really worried about where higher education as a whole is going.
I’ve been shouting this with stadium expansion. The trend is going towards smaller stadiums. We need to read the trend correctly. Also I find it funny no mention of how realignment destroyed rivalries that college sports are built in.
I still think improvements in home TVs and the abundance of sports on TV are big factors. I detest sitting upper level now at anything. Why do that when you have such a great seat at the house?
Of course I saw tons of open lower level seats both at our games and other games on TV for programs much older than ours so what the hell do I know. It’s surely many factors working together.