Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve seen quite a few college football personalities lamenting the current state of college football, as the passion just doesn’t seem up to par for the sport. There does seem to be a bit of fan malaise, and the finger is often pointed at unfettered free agency. That is the root cause of the issue, as backups leaving rather than sticking around to start as upperclassmen has weakened the depth of top tier programs and improved the starting squads of the middle tier.
As a result the sport no longer has a true villain to hate, and petty hate watching is the backbone of college football fanaticism.
For the better part of two decades, Nick Saban was the sport’s lightning rod, his Crimson Tide the designated villain. With life changing money not yet a part of the equation for student athletes, Saban was able to sell his development program to stack the two deep with NFL talent. Alabama routinely redshirted players that could have started immediately at 50 programs across the country, and that depth resulted in a dynasty that every other fanbase united against.
Even fanbases that hated one another could bond over watching the dynasty fall. “We Want Bama” became a meme. Alabama fans dominated the TV ratings as more people watched hoping to see them lose than to see them win.
Alabama certainly isn’t the only program that could call itself a villain over the past couple of decades. Big Ten fanbases have had a similar dynamic with Ohio State, Big 12 fanbases despised Texas before they left, and hating Notre Dame is something that many fanbases can rally behind. Saban simply won more than anyone else for a long time and managed to unite fanbases across the country.
This isn’t unique to college football. Fans that are nostalgic for “golden ages” of various sports remember the NBA dominated by the Lakers and Celtics, then Jordan’s Bulls. The Yankees were the team to hate in Major League Baseball, and thanks to the economics of the sport Los Angeles has now taken that mantle. At various times the Steelers, 49ers, Cowboys, and Patriots have been the villains of the NFL. Like Saban’s hey day at Alabama, millions of fans would watch those teams hoping to see them taste defeat.
Winning a disproportionate amount is the primary driver of that villain arc and, thanks to parity driven by NIL and the portal, right now nobody in college football is consistently dominating. There simply isn’t anyone to drive the same level of hate that sustains interest in college football.
Playoff expansion hasn’t helped matters. Go back 15 years and Georgia losing to Auburn, which is probably going to be the flukiest outcome that the sport sees this year, could have eliminated the top ranked team from national title contention. That game would have been the biggest story in sports for a week, but was shrugged off in the current climate because everyone gets a mulligan.
Some continue to argue that the playoff hasn’t made the regular season less interesting, but that’s a difficult position to defend. If everyone is going to lose games and the committee is simply going to decide between flawed resumes, then what is the point of getting all riled up over a game in October? Even if the sport were to find a new villain, there isn’t as much excitement in seeing them lose. And the expansion to 24 teams only makes that worse.
It may well be that fans one day embrace all of this as the new norm, and parity makes the sport more popular than ever.
But, for now, I think that everyone is missing someone to hate.
