College Football Is Not and Should Not Try to Be the NFL

In the days following the College Football National Championship Game, Outkick founder Clay Travis took to X to note that:

Just 22.1 million viewers watched Ohio State-Notre Dame, the third lowest playoff title game viewership on record. Truly awful number given expansion to 12 playoff teams. The title game was played on Monday night as they all have been in the playoff era. So why the tiny number?

He continued:

My best theory, as someone who loves CFB, the ceiling needs to be lifted for potential audiences. 100 million watch every Super Bowl. The CFB ceiling appears to be roughly 30 million right now no matter who plays. How does the potential audience expand? And why is CFB so much lower than the NFL? What is the NFL doing, in other words to grow and sell its game to the general public so much better?

Travis has long been a proponent of expanding the College Football Playoffs though, notably, he favored an eight-team rather than the 12-team format we ended up getting. Although I’ve always appreciated Travis’s insights, I confess to being deeply unimpressed as I watched the first year of expanded playoffs unfold. It was impossible not to miss the college football of the past.

College football has gradually moved from a sport deeply rooted in regional traditions to one obsessed with realignment and economic expansion. Too many people forget that college football is not the NFL. The NFL is a private enterprise, a money-making venture. It showcases the most elite players in the world and has emerged as the preeminent professional sport in America. College football is something different. The players on the field are student athletes. The markets they play in are Oxford, Clemson, and South Bend.

College football has several attributes the NFL could never replicate. Most major college football programs are attached to large state universities in the South, Midwest, or Great Plains. While the game’s origins might be found in the Northeast and several major programs exist on the West Coast, College football is a game rooted in America’s heartland.

The NFL has the Super Bowl, the big broadcast deals, and Fantasy Football leagues. College football has the campuses, the rivalries, the mascots, student sections, marching bands, and fight songs. The NFL Draft features the very elite of the college ranks, but your average college player will never step foot on a professional field.

In college football, the biggest game of the year is not really the National Championship, but the annual showdown between inner-state or border-state rivals. The NFL does not have an equivalent of Michigan vs Ohio State or the Iron Bowl. In short, college football should stop trying to be the NFL and embrace its own rich traditions.

If college football really wanted to showcase the best aspects of its game, it would scrap the playoff format altogether. In an ideal world, college football would take three simple steps to restore the game’s glory.

Step One. Break up the superconferences and return to conferences based on geographic region. Sixteen schools in the Southeastern Conference (SEC) and eighteen in the Big Ten is just absurd. Conferences should return to the same relative makeup and size they were in 1990. The Big Ten had (you guessed it) just 10 programs centered around the Great Lakes. The Big Eight was the conference of the Great Plains. The SEC did not leave the Southeast, the Southwest Conference (SWC) was almost exclusively in Texas and PAC Ten represented the West Coast. A return to such a format would allow each conference to consist of about eight to 10 schools which would result in every team within them playing each other. This would also make it much easier to crown a conference champion without a title game.

Step Two. Bring back traditional bowl tie-ins. Let’s send the Big Ten and PAC Ten champions back to the Rose Bowl. The ACC champs should go to the Orange Bowl, the SEC champ to the Sugar Bowl and SWC champs to the Cotton Bowl. New tie-ins could also be made. Perhaps a revived Big East champion would go to the Peach Bowl or the Big Eight to the Fiesta Bowl. Mid-Major conference winners like the Mid-American Conference (MAC), Western Athletic Conference (WAC) and Mountain West champions could all have bowl tie-ins as well. Bowl season might still begin in mid-December and wrap up around New Year’s Day. Such an overhaul to the system would not only satisfy the fans and their irrepressible nostalgia, but it would make bowl games much more meaningful.

Step Three. Assemble a committee to pick the best two teams in the land after the bowl games are played. College football is centered around the importance of polls and committees. After all, it was the conflicting decision between the Associated Press and the Coaches Poll that crowned both Michigan and Nebraska National Champions in 1997. This spurred the creation of the Bowl Championship Series (BCS) in 1998. The major flaw of the BCS was choosing the two best teams following conference play rather than after the bowl games. The National Championship Game should be played on a Saturday (not a Monday), the week following New Year’s Day.

If you ask more than one college football fan what their favorite game of the year is, you will get a different response from each of them. This is because college football is a regional game and not a national one. No one cares who plays the halftime show at the national championship game. In fact, the preference would probably be the marching bands from the teams on the field. A gap in viewership between the Super Bowl and its college counterpart is inconsequential. Autumn Saturdays belong to college football and always have. Let’s embrace the rites and rituals that have made the game great for over a century. Give us that old time college football.

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