How ESPN Ruined College Football

what even is this and why are there five bye weeks

I suffer from the lifelong affliction known as Arkansas Razorback fandom. Watching the Hogs play LSU the day after Thanksgiving as Matt Jones or Darren McFadden did the impossible is one of my earliest memories. Sometimes, the game impacted an SEC or national title. Most of the time it didn't. But, the game always mattered. Always.

It is difficult to say exactly when the sport got swallowed whole by The Worldwide Leader In Sports. Somewhere along the way, though, the good people at ESPN decided that the true measure of if a game matters isn't the intensity of the rivalry, the pride, or the players, but simply the total number of people who watch.

With this simple truth established, these godless TV executives shattered old rivalries and created sad facsimiles of the real thing. UCLA playing Wisconsin in October? Welcome to the new and improved Big Ten. ESPN cares about historic rivalries in the same way the NCAA cares about player safety and academic integrity.

ESPN went from broadcasting the sport to running it. A TV network owned by a certain mouse is now college football's judge, jury, and executioner. The Hollywood suits bought up the rights to conferences, created their own postseason structure, and decided which teams mattered based on Nielsen ratings and Twitter engagement instead of on-field product.

To watch the sport now is to be smothered by a constant, algorithmically engineered urgency, where every game is a marquee matchup and every rivalry has an official corporate sponsor (the Battle Line rivalry is not a thing and stop trying to make it one). ESPN tries to make us forget what we've lost by drowning us in more — more talking heads, more graphics, more montages scored to Imagine Dragons — and yet, each game feels thinner, the actual football mere background noise to the spectacle.

ESPN has done more to college football than monetize it. It has warped it into a wholly different thing, an entertainment product optimized for engagement and eyeballs, more like reality TV than competitive sport. The games are now stretched and manipulated by TV timeouts to the point where a single quarter can last over an hour. The bowl season, once a charming end to the season and a prize for a job well done, is now a bloated, 40-game content farm for ad revenue that most players skip anyways.

And in its wake? The sport’s beating heart—the regional quirks, the wishbone offenses, the volatility of a game where Appalachian State can send the entire state of Michigan into a tailspin—has been surgically removed in favor of marketing gimmicks.

What has been lost in this ESPN land grab is not just the amateurish idealism of the sport (which, let's be honest, was always a bit of a fiction), but the beautiful peculiarity of college football. The fact that a team like Georgia Tech could run the triple option for years or that Iowa could weaponize punting to achieve yet another 8-4 record. The NFL could never.

Now, those quirks are being paved over for content uniformity where the only difference between teams is the color of the uniform. The sport is being repackaged into a homogenized, made-for-TV Event, to be digested in GIFs and soundbites and pre-planned emotional montages.

And yet, I will tune in next year despite my growing disgust. Because even as the sport diminishes, I find ever smaller slivers of joy in a game where a team of 19-year-olds can win a national title one year and go 6-6 the next. Where on any given Saturday your team might put it all together, and you can say "I told you so" when that JUCO tackle you were high on in the preseason makes a key sack.

And now, like a rerun playing on loop, we are doomed to Ohio State and Alabama being given second, third, and even fourth chances at national titles, because extra games for the big names is good for business. Hey, at least none of that new TV money goes to the players, the fans can still pay for that.