The year was 1869…Rutgers battled New Jersey (later named Princeton University) in the first college football game ever played. About one hundred spectators attended the inaugural showdown in New Brunswick, New Jersey that November day. There were no professional scouts in the stands (if there were any stands at all). It would be another fifty years before the NFL was launched. I’m sure the attire the players wore was strikingly different than the gear donned by today’s valiant warriors of the gridiron.
Flash forward some one-hundred fifty years. Crowds at big time college football games at schools such as Penn State, Alabama, and Ohio State, just to name a few, rival the size of large American cities. One-hundred thousand plus fans pack these stadiums on a given Saturday. The revenue generated from one home game, from gate receipts, to parking, concessions, and more, rivals the entire athletic budget for some smaller Division I institutions of higher learning. Not to mention, athletics are the primary marketing arm of many schools. Studies have shown applications increase when the football and basketball teams succeed.
Most of us who follow major college athletics already instinctively knew this, but the coronavirus pandemic has shined the light on the big business aspect of major football and basketball programs on our college and university campuses. While the list of players and coaches testing positive for the coronavirus has filled as much or more of the conversation than play-off contenders, the games must go on. There is big time money to be lost if they don’t. Don’t be fooled: the reason major conferences are playing football isn’t out of an altruistic concern for the student-athletes mental health.
Notice how most FCS conferences, Division II and III schools across the country are not playing compared to their FBS brethren. Not saying who’s right or wrong here but it’s clearly obvious what is driving this need to play at the highest level of college football. I’ll give you a hint: it’s green!
The southern schools were the first to join the foray with their intentions to play this fall. College football isn’t a religion in the south, it is much more important than that. Schools from the PAC-12 and BIG-10 joined the party later, I’m sure with their budgetary bottom lines in the front view.
While most games are being contested with limited capacity or no spectators at all, the television rights deals for these conferences are still astronomical. In essence, big-time college athletics have become quasi-professional leagues in which the athletes are semi compensated with their scholarship. When you consider the year round work these athletes devote to their sports and then factor in the amount of money generated by the universities, the contrast is stark indeed. The money generated from major college football is so great, particularly in comparison to all other sports, it was reported recently the Football Bowl Subdivision schools are considering withdrawing from the NCAA for football.
In order to continue to perpetrate this notion of the regular Joe student-athlete, the NCAA runs ad-nauseum promotional ads during March Madness citing the virtues and wholesomeness of the student-athlete experience. We continue to watch these knowing all too well many of the players on the court, particularly the one and doners, haven’t attended a class all semester. Such a farce it has become, ESPN’s Jay Bilas laughs during the postgame press conferences at these events when the moderator asks: “Are there any more questions for the “student-athletes””?
I’m a huge fan of college football and basketball and will still tune in to watch as we get to the New Year’s Day play-offs and again during March Madness. We are kidding ourselves if we still believe big time college athletics is about the welfare of the student-athlete. It is not and has not been for a very long time.
