College football has destroyed Olympic Sports

College football has had no effect at all on synchronized swimming, water polo, bobsled, that gymnastics thing with ribbons, ping pong, horse jumping, target shooting, badminton, or any of the many other proud and wildly popular olympic traditions on display quadrennially.

College football will be in shambles now that it’s lost you as a fan!

In about an hour and a half from right now,,,,,TCU vs Colorado on TV. Will be having a red chilli burritos,(toaster oven) apple sauce and cottage cheese with it, oh yeah....ice cold milk, talking brain freeze cold.

I don't care about who is in what conference. football is football.

And the Olympics aren't going anywhere. football having no impact at all,

Speaking of TCU...

8 sub10.00 sprinters, no sub 20,00, hmmmm?

There are quite a few schools where their Olympic sports teams are financed by the football team.

Agreed.

Very sad what greed from the NCAA, College Presidents etc. has done and they still have the audacity to infuse “student athlete” in their limp wrist responses.

From some of the responses to this thread, there are people who just want to be entertained by college football which is fine. Just call it what it is Professional Sport, carve it out, don’t try and justify the student athlete myth about football players, have the professional college teams play wearing college jerseys, people can still drink their beer and eat Doritos, NCAA spread proceeds across all, after all college football has been subsidizing the NFL for years by training its future recruits, have the NFL pay the NCAA for that privilege, boosters will still have something to cheer and manipulate with money, get back to a regional structure so other sports can have student athletes not crisscrossing the country, take out football scholarships from the title IX equation so men’s sports can rebuild with equal numbers of scholarships as women. Then the Olympic sports in college sports may actually improve. For it to improve for the US have restrictions to the numbers of foreign athletes/scholarships so we lessen the subsidy to other county’s Olympic sports teams.

Colleges are not keen on the idea of calling their football and basketball teams "professional" even though they really are at least with the top programs and I get their reasoning. College teams, no matter how good, are not the NBA or NFL. They become minor league sports if they call their athletes pros. If that happens is there still the interest and accompanying revenue as they get now or does interest and revenue drop to something like what the G League or International League teams are getting? However bogus the "student-athlete" idea seems to anyone really paying attention I think all schools believe it's a major part of what creates interest in their sports.

Don't you mean low revenue sports?

Low revenue sports are the fleas on the body of the dog. Football is what fuels softball and cross country.

As much as I detest college football for a number of reasons it's slowly becoming what it has been for close to a century the equivalent of rookie ball in baseball but with much more interest and money.

Without college football and men's basketball, many non-revenue sports would be cut.

I think that is what the OP means without saying it correctly... what is going to happen is non-rev sports are going to suffer (be dropped) at the schools which have a football team which is not in a big money conference. The schools which are getting the big TV contract payouts will have no trouble fielding as many non-rev sports as they want... it's the other schools which will suffer... especially when NIL is added. Oh well, change is constant.

Who loves ya, Baby!

But those schools out of big money conferences were not making money from football anyway. And some of them have built successful programs. For example, how much money NAU's track/xc team got from their football team out of Big Sky conference? Their home football games averaged under 8,000 spectators a game last year.

Many other successful programs have come out of schools in FCS divisions or FBS outside of P5, or schools without football. It's a myth that you need football money to build a successful team in other sports.

The only schools that suffer from the current realignment are Oregon State and Washington State. And those schools didn't have good programs to begin with. WSU ranked #166 in the Director's Cup standings last season, by far the lowest among any P5 schools. (The second lowest is Rutgers at #130.) And it's not just last season. Their 10 yr average is #114 and they didn't finish higher than #80 in any of the last 10 years. (OSU's 10 yr average is #64. The second lowest in the conference.) They also have the fewest NCAA titles in the conference (OSU has four. WSU has two.)

Considering the USA make up around 4% of the world's population, this may not be quite as big a problem as you think

False. The majority of football programs break even or lose money. Clemson in its heyday had 60 million of football revenue but would spend it all on fb. With nil boosters have diverted most of the giving to fb and basketball. Look it up.

The demise of the NCAA and Conferences has been long anticipated and overdue.

Now we have AI driven 24/7/365 streaming servers running college sports at ESPN and Fox.

Humans still have to monitor the decisions made by AI.

AI isn't perfect.

We'll see if revenue jumps as Fox and ESPN has promised the schools.

The top college football programs are making in excess of $100 million dollars. The goal is to break even. It’s hard for them to spend all that money but the GOAL is to break even. Why? Because then they can go back to high spending donors and businesses, and keep asking for more money to keep the football team rolling. If they rolled over (did not spend) 40 million dollars each year then donors would stop donating because they feel like they have enough money

Do people watch college football? Seems like a niche sport..

2nd biggest sport in the US behind only the powerhouse NFL.

You should get out more.

I've been saying for a while that they need to go ahead and let the 40-50 power football teams break off from the NCAA and officially form the professional league that they already operate as. Then the other schools can go back to playing actual college sports.

By the way, there is nothing "minor league" about the big power college football teams. They are a major league in their own right in terms of revenue generation, media attention, and fan interest. They'll remain just as popular as they are now without the "student-athlete" label.

According to this source, 893 schools have college football teams, including all levels.

ncsasports.org

Your Comprehensive List of College Football Teams

@ncsa

We’ve compiled a list of college coaching changes and new college football programs, as well as broken down some of the main features of each division level. Find college football teams here.

Open link

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I was surprised the number was that high. At the vast majority of them, it is a niche sport. For about 40-50 schools, it is anything but a niche sport. It's the second most popular spectator sport in America behind the NFL.

What needs to happen is to quit trying to govern all 893 teams with the same rules. Let the 40-50 break off and do their own thing, and then the rest can go back to a real college athletics model.

What creates interest in the sport is 30k or more young people at the institution with free weekends . After spending 4 years going to games, many want to continue to do so. For teams in college towns or cities without pro teams - which is everywhere but 20 some cities (some have more than 1 team like la), going to the college game is like going to the nfl game. Very few care about the student athlete aspect and many fans of the top college teams would say why wasn't he given easier classes or someone to do his homework for him if a starting football player was declared academically ineligible. Of course that won't happen because any player who struggles academically at schools like these is put in classes that are on par with your typical high school.