College football’s biggest threat is the continued regionalization of success and interest in the sport
Is the south's dominance of college football becoming problematic for the sport?
A little over a year ago, I published my second installment of The Electoral Map Of Football, an attempt by me to figure out the national electoral preference of football between the NFL and college football. By flipping North Carolina and Virginia to college football states, the result was closer than you’d imagine and you’d think indicate that college football is perhaps narrowing the gap with the NFL in terms of interest.
But of late, the ratings have presented a bit of different picture and particularly the ratings for the College Football Playoff, which has largely been dominated by the SEC and to a much greatest extent to the SEC’s footprint (states with SEC teams in them). Looking at how things have gone in the playoff era you begin to see a concerning trend.
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You can actually feel and see college football slipping in terms of national relevance. Daytime ESPN has pushed college football further away from the constantly discussed NFL and the NBA and more towards the afterthoughts of MLB and the NHL. ESPN has largely grown comfortable ceding the majority of news-breaking of the sport to other outlets. They’ve crunched the numbers and know that for large parts of the country, college football is much more of an afterthought than what it used to be and the NBA and the NFL are surer bets more worthy of airtime. Simply put, ESPN would rather talk NBA and NFL all day because that’s the preference of viewers in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, DC, Phoenix, Denver, the Bay Area, and Boston. If college football fans don’t want the NFL and NBA jammed down their throat, most of them can just flip over to the conference network of their choosing with ESPN well-positioned by owning the networks servicing fans in the south with the SEC Network and ACC Network.
Meanwhile, the three power conferences with TV deals coming up and unsure of their future prospects are the Big Ten, Big 12, and the Pac 12, soon to be representing those remaining 3 of the last 24 championships. While the Big Ten is in a good position for a new deal, the Big 12 and Pac 12 are seemingly precarious positions between not much recent championship or playoff success and at a severe rating disadvantage. It’s very plausible one or both of the conferences may soon find themselves playing a majority of their games on a streaming service like Amazon Prime, Apple TV+, or ESPN+, something that will certainly not do any favors with fans or recruits.
Does playoff expansion help or hurt this trend? The BCS seemingly did away with whatever balance college football had settled into. Realignment and the playoff only accelerated the trend of southern regionalization of the sport. Seeing more teams from around the country in the playoff certainly seems like a good thing but it also opens up the door for more final fours with all southern teams, something we already saw in 2018 with Georgia, Alabama, Oklahoma, and Clemson making the playoff (Oklahoma, then in the Big 12).
Between another round of realignment, the transfer portal, NIL, and playoff expansion, we’re entering a new very different chapter of college football. These added variables have the ability to further tilt success towards the near southern monopoly over the sport. Perhaps we’ll see the opposite play out and these change agents will revert back some of the parity the sport enjoyed before the BCS.
Ultimately, college football’s growing regional imbalance of interest and success doesn’t register that much to stakeholders within the sport because it has yet to affect the bottom line. Playoff expansion actually will probably push back any real concern over this for another decade given the amount of money it will inject into the sport. That said, it’s not hard to envision a world in the not so distant future where there are no more games to add to the playoff, conferences are too fat to expand any further, there are no more conference networks to launch, and nobody tunes in to find the stream of a lowly regular-season matchup played in a half-empty stadium between two teams that haven’t finished in the top five in 50 years. For many pockets of the country, this is already a reality and one that’s coming to many states and schools in the not-so-distant future.
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