Scott Davis: College football's passion problem

Scott Davis has followed South Carolina athletics for over 40 years and provides commentary from a fan perspective. He writes a weekly newsletter year-round (the following is his most recent) and a column during football season that’s published on GamecockCentral.com. To receive Scott’s newsletter every Friday, sign up here.

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I promise we’ll eventually get to this South Carolina men’s basketball season.

Seriously, it’ll happen. Maybe next week. Or the week after that. Or in 2037 – whenever I’m feeling up to it. We’ll get there.

But while I’m working up the fortitude to write about that lost campaign, let me take a quick second to make a confession to you.

I didn’t watch Monday night’s College Football Playoff final between Ohio State and Notre Dame.

And by “not watching it,” I don’t mean that I wasn’t laser-focused on the game, or that I had it on in the background while I napped and read a magazine, or that I checked in on it while flipping back and forth between it and reruns of “The Office.” I mean I never flipped over to it – not even once – and have actually yet to see even a single highlight from it.

The next time I see any footage at all from that game’s broadcast will be the first time I’ve seen it.

First, some caveats: I was traveling last weekend, and I was tired, and it was ice-cold where I live, and I’m not a fan – or even a mild enthusiast – of either Notre Dame or Ohio State, so we could make a plausible case that this was a one-time thing where I took a yearly break, recharged the batteries after an extremely long college football season and taxing winter, and that I’ll once again be raring to go for the sport’s return this fall.

And we might also add that I wasn’t alone.

The game’s viewership – while still massive – was down 12.5% from last year’s title game and finished as the third-lowest in viewers of the last 11 CFP finals. Maybe many of us weren’t particularly feeling Buckeyes-Irish. It happens.

Still, I think it’s worth pondering: How did we reach the point where someone like me – a lifelong college football obsessive who reveres the game’s traditions, pageantry and history – didn’t feel any impulse whatsoever to tune in for even a single second to the biggest game of the year (which was taking place in my own city)?

Year after year, I may hate the matchup (especially if a certain Upstate university is participating in it), but I always tune in. I always pay attention.

I didn’t this year. And I don’t regret it. If given the opportunity, I would gladly not watch it again.

Why?

Is my passion for my favorite sport in decline? Can that really be true?

Believe it or not, I have some thoughts.

Alienation Nation

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There’s one thing I’ve learned in the last few years while writing for GamecockCentral.

Since 2020 or so, whenever I’ve written anything about the state of college football, the overwhelming and chaotic change that is affecting it, and the ground-shaking earthquake that NIL and the transfer portal have delivered to the sport, our readers will respond in droves.

A couple of weeks ago, I slapped together a newsletter about the spectacularly low level of interest that I’d had in watching this year’s non-playoff bowl games, sent it in, and promptly forgot about it until my inbox wound up getting pounded by readers who shared similar stories.

The last time I’d gotten that large of a response had been about a year earlier…when I wrote about the disappointing Juice Wells saga and the uncertainty that the transfer portal had wrought.

We seem to have entered into a dizzying period in which no one is sure if the ground upon which they stand is solid – not players, not coaches, and especially not fans. And what seems to be frustrating most of the game’s supporters is that no one seems to be in charge.

Take this year’s College Football Playoff selection, for example. In the very first year of a 12-team playoff, the committee tasked for choosing the participants seemed utterly incapable of articulating what they were looking for or why certain teams were chosen over others.

If someone could have told me why SMU was in the field, I would have listened. But no one did. In fact, no one even tried to. We’ve had years to plan this overhaul – and yet somehow no one created a prepared list of characteristics that the committee was seeking for playoff teams.

Meanwhile, NIL payments and the transfer portal seem to have simply landed on top of the sport overnight. There’s been no oversight, no game plan, no rules or regulations, no nothing.

As a result, what I sense more than anything else from the fans I talk to is a profound feeling of alienation from the sport they’ve always loved the most: They don’t recognize it. It doesn’t feel like the sport they grew up caring about. At what point is too much change a detriment rather than a benefit?

Feelings and vibes and perceptions matter more in college sports than they do in pro sports. College sports are all feelings, all the time.

And when fans look at this sport right now, the feeling they seem to be having the most is this: I’m not as passionate about this as I used to be.

College Football’s Vibecession

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For most of the last two years, economists have continued to insist that the United States was not in a recession. The major economic indicators didn’t show that we were in one.

And yet to average Americans, it simply felt like the country was in one. Inflation had soared, and job growth wasn’t exactly roaring, and things just seemed kind of blah out there. The term coined to describe this weird state of affairs was vibecession.

When it came to the economy, the vibes weren’t good.

Maybe we weren’t actually in a recession by the letter of the law, but it felt to a lot of people like we were in one, and at the end of the day, that feeling overwhelmed everything else.

I’m sure that college football’s leaders – whoever they may be – could point to a host of statistics to tell you and me that the sport is healthier than it’s ever been. More people watch the sport than ever before, they’ll tell us.

The schools and the networks are raking in the cash. And so are the coaches. And now, so are the players.

How can something that’s not working be awash in cash?

But it doesn’t matter to me what all the leading indicators and charts and graphs tell me.

What matters is how I feel. What matters are the vibes, and they seem off.

What matters is the simple fact that I’m not as passionate about the game as I was even five years ago.

That seems sad to me. I hope someone in the sport’s highest echelons cares about my feelings.

I hope they care about yours, too.

Tell me what you think about the state of college athletics by writing me at [email protected].

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