College football is my favorite sport, but very little of it has to do with the actual game being played.
Not to wax poetic but you know what I’m talking about. Fall air, food, friends, tailgates. Insert cliched college football experience here.
Ultimately, college football is truly, at least in my mind, about the togetherness that it brings to a community for at least 12, maybe 13 and hopefully 15 days a year. It, like the foliage of fall, has a unique beauty that you can’t quite put your finger on and part of that experience is centered around being inside of a stadium and cheering for your team.
But it certainly feels like we’re starting to lose that.
College football’s next era of growth is here as television has begun to dictate the future of the game, and it’s hurting those who, you know, enjoy actually going to the games.
There is nothing I can do about this. There is nothing you can do about this. There’s nothing apparently coaches or administrators or players can do about it.
In fact, there’s nothing that’s stopped this, prevented this, and it’s probably been happening for quite a while. It’s just very on display right now.
I, like many of you, read through Pete Thamel’s article last night about the television contract issues related to the Big Ten commissioner transition.
The vast majority of those issues stemmed from Kevin Warren not knowing enough about what the Fox and Big Ten Network contract said, thus offering NBC and CBS maybe more than he could have.
That mess is having a real impact on the schedule. As an effort to appease execs at NBC and CBS, the conference is reportedly putting Penn State’s game with Michigan State in East Lansing on Black Friday so it can likely be in primetime, even if it competes with part of the first ever NFL Black Friday game on Amazon. Ohio State has to have a Nov. 11 night game, the latest ever night game at the Horseshoe.
And speaking of those November night games, according to Thamel, coaches and schools were relatively blindsided by the fact they will now become a, well, thing in a conference that has shied away from them, largely because it’s, you know, cold in the Midwest and Mid-Atlantic at that point of the year.
Away from those TV contract issues, we’ve already essentially accepted the fact that playoff games are going to have to compete with NFL games for attention. More immediately, the rules of the game are being changed this season to maybe lead to a faster game. Things like running clocks after first downs outside of the final few minutes of each half are being put in place, all in an effort to speed up games that can now go on for well over three and a half hours. Those games are leading to later nights, which are leading to later times getting home from those games — and if it’s a loss, rougher hangover headaches the next day.
Of course, the alternative would have been to cut the number of television timeouts or even the length of those timeouts. And obviously it’s a bit of a chicken-egg problem as you need the TV revenue to keep the sport well financed. But no one who worries about the bills is going to agree to that.
So I ask: Who is going to want to go to a Black Friday night game after driving back to [insert your college town here] from Thanksgiving with the family to watch [insert your college] play [insert rival college] in [insert below freezing temperature] that’s still going to take [insert time over three and a half hours here] all thanks to television?
And I recognize there is some privilege in going to college football games. It is no longer as affordable as it once was. Tickets prices, like many other costs, are through the roof right now with no signs of coming down. Mix in parking, gas, food, tailgating supplies, maybe a hotel, and I understand why people are coming to games less often that would maybe come to several a season. But those human moments, that togetherness, that’s what makes college football so great.
These scheduling challenges aren’t anything new. Being a college football fan has already been annoying thanks to everyone’s favorite phrase: Six-day windows. Those quite literal game time decisions are once again all because of television. Not that any good college fan shouldn’t do this already but you have to keep your calendar essentially clear from the first weekend of September until later November. With six-day windows, if you’ve got morning plans, you better hope it’s the 3:30 kick time and not the noon kick time, because now you’ve got to sell your ticket or you’re out some serious cash.
I have to imagine there’s a lot of kids and parents that miss out on games because little Johnny’s got a soccer game at 8 a.m. that will be over by 9 a.m. but it’s a three-hour drive to State College from the Jersey side of Philly so they’ll miss a noon game — often the more affordable games to go to as well.
Forgive my ignorance, my naivety and my longingness for the glory days, but it’s almost like they don’t want you to go to the game anymore. In fact, it’s almost like they want you to watch television.
For those of you that listen to the podcast, I’m starting to sound like Steve here, I know. But college football isn’t about the game alone. It’s about the entire experience. Now television is railroading that experience even more.
The organic pageantry of college football is what makes it must-see TV. It’s why Penn State’s White Out was one of a few games that already was given a kick time. For the country, it is must-see TV.
Yet, there have to be butts in the seats for things like that to happen. I’ve been to that Penn State-Michigan State game in East Lansing several times. It’s usually cold, like very cold. It’s also usually very well-unattended. Michigan State fans are passionate but it’s the weekend of Thanksgiving. Students aren’t there because they’re on break. Even when the Spartans clinched the East back in 2015, it wasn’t that full in Spartan Stadium. Now, putting that game on Black Friday is only going to make it more complicated for them or any traveling Penn Stater to get there.
And this trend is going to continue with those prices, those murky scheduling procedures and those television contracts.
College football’s scheduling has become fan unfriendly and that’s all because of television.
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