Why College Football TV Ratings Are Booming

I have always been skeptical that a 12-team playoff, this expanded playoff, is the best thing for the sport

Because one of the things that I loved most about the sport was the regular season, man, did it matter

A game like the Eagles or the Steelers, a game like the Bills and the Lions

In college, that's not just a big game, that game's an elimination game

Imagine the loser of Bill's Lions doesn't make the playoffs. I mean, imagine the loser of Steelers, Eagles walks

That's it, season done. I mean, that's the type of significance. So many big regular season games used to have in college

And I was worried that 12 teams strips us of that. And in some ways it did

In some ways, when you had Ohio State and Michigan, and Ohio State can lose that game and still comfortably get into the college football

playoff, then you really don't have the monumental significance of the regular season anymore

But what I didn't account for was that didn't matter to most fans

What mattered to most fans was not making sure that a two-loss team didn't get in

It was a more democratic version of college football because ratings were sky high this year for the regular season, sky high. Interest has boomed. And a couple

of things strike me about that Number one for all of the cynics the pessimists the naysayers that said well if we start paying college players then amateurism gone and nobody going to want to watch

Fans will leave in droves because nobody wants to watch paid college players

Whoops. I mean, did it even make a blip on anybody's radar

Did anybody even stop for five minutes and say, I can't really enjoy this game because the quarterback is making $750,000 in NIL money

It doesn't even register. It doesn't even register. The second part is, and look, I believe it, that when you water down the regular season

then the sport starts to lose some juice. That clearly didn't take either

That obviously didn't take. And so what you have is a sport that actually built an audience

which is so hard to do in 2024 with such a saturated market

they built a new audience. And they built audiences out of schools

that used to never have a dog in the fight. And it is amazing to watch a sport go up like this

when everything is topsy-turvy and nobody seems to be going, this is not the sport that I used to love

I mean, look at the ACC that's got school. in the Bay Area and Florida, look at the Big Ten where Oregon and Rutgers are conference foes

Look at the Big 12. Could you even keep track of who was in the Big 12 of this year

And yet none of that seemed to depress interest in the sport It was pretty amazing to watch All the things that many people assumed could hurt the sport irrevocably did it

And what saved it was the playoff. And it is a reminder for myself who works at a business of trying to gauge what people want to listen to and want to watch and hear about

what they want to watch and hear about. and what they want to watch and hear about is football

The NBA's ratings are struggling. Baseball's had to tweak a lot of things, and they've done a good job

and they had really good ratings in October. But boy, they still have a lot of work to be done

Stanley Cup playoffs, they had a huge game seven last year. That was phenomenal

But obviously, the NHL has always been trying to work their way up the mountain

MLS Cup barely registered. Nobody even noticed that the Red Bulls and Galaxy played

Ratings way down. WNBA, doing very well. Caitlin Clark effect. But one thing matters more than anything

Football wins and football inventory wins. And it doesn't matter how you doctor it up

Doesn't matter if you pay the players or not. doesn't matter if the leagues of the conferences, the rivalries look nothing the way they used to

people still flock to football. There's just no doubt about it. And there's a lot of reasons why

I mean, legalized gambling certainly has helped football because it's the easiest sport to wager on

There are numbers are round. You talking about sevens and threes and fours instead of one and a half goals a half run you know a lot harder In basketball people don have to watch until the final five minutes in football

You have to sit down and watch an entire game. You get sucked in. The scarcity of it, just one game a week versus two or three are in baseball's case, six or seven

Football has the perfect product. And college football is learning that today. More inventory

And by the way, we had how many. people say around college football, well, you can't have an expanded playoff because there's too many games

What about the academics? Whoops. 2.0. Did they ever really believe it

Because think about this. A team that plays in the first round that plays at the national championship game would play 12 regular season games

Let's just take Arizona State, for example, 12 regular season games. a 13th conference championship game

14 is the first round. 15 is the second round. 16, 17 potential games being played

You kidding me? 16 or 17 games being played by a championship team

is a professional schedule. That is a professional schedule. And yet, does anybody cry academics

with these football teams, with these football players. Nobody even mentions that players will be gone constantly on the road for a month

month and a half to play playoff games, post-season games. Whoops. Guess that wasn't that big a deal, huh

Guess that just wasn't that big a deal. Pretty amazing