The NFL is designed to crown a champion. It has equal schedules, capped salaries, fair drafts, and structured parity. It’s a machine built to decide who’s best. College football is the opposite. It’s inherently unfair. Some teams get six home games, others three. Some conferences play eight games, while others play nine. Texas may schedule Ohio State out of conference while Georgia plays Marshall. With 133 programs, the sport is structurally incapable of determining the best the way the NFL can.
And for so long, that was fine. That unfairness created space for dozens of narratives to matter simultaneously. You didn’t need to be in contention for a national championship to have a meaningful season. You could beat your rival, win your conference, or earn a bowl berth for the first time in a decade. The impossibility of fair comparison meant more things could matter.
In the past decade, college football has been trying to become the NFL: NIL, the transfer portal, conference realignment. But the aspect that’s flown most under the radar in hollowing out the sport is the obsession with crowning a national champion.
History of the National Champion
The championship obsession didn’t start recently, and the sport has never been able to agree on how to crown a champion. For most of the 20th century, the national title was decided by polls. There was the Associated Press and the Coaches Poll. It was a wildly imperfect system. Voters saw only a handful of games due to no DVR and TV restrictions, and coaches rarely watched anyone but their opponents. Unsurprisingly, the polls disagreed 11 times between 1950 and 1997. Coaches lobbied and the media debated, but those conversations didn’t define the season, and they didn’t interfere with everything else. Rivalries, conference championships, and bowl games all mattered on their own terms.
The BCS (1998–2014) paired #1 and #2 using polls and computers, preserving bowl tradition while creating a title game. But flaws still persisted. In 2003, USC was top-two in both polls but didn’t make the Championship Game because the computers didn’t value their metrics. The system also faced antitrust challenges.
In 2014, the College Football Playoff debuted as the solution. A 13-person committee selected the top four teams for a single-elimination bracket, rotating through the New Year’s Six bowls. The playoff was undoubtedly the fairest way yet to determine a championship. However, bowl games lost prestige, with star players sitting out even New Year’s Six bowls if their team missed the Playoff.
The 12-team playoff is in its second year. It was sold as increasing parity and creating marquee matchups. Parity hasn’t and won’t improve, as it’s virtually impossible for a Group of Five team to win multiple games. And sure, there are more marquee matchups. But they came at a disproportionate cost. The old systems, imperfect as they were, left room for conference championships, bowl games, and regular-season matchups to matter alongside the national title race. The expanded playoff obliterated that balance. Now there’s one narrative: who’s in and who’s out. Games still decide conference championships and rivalries, but when they don’t shift playoff seeding, they lose prominence.
The current 12-team CFP format created the possibility of this problem. The expansion to 4 teams, then to 12, wasn’t just about fairness; it was also about money. And that’s where ESPN’s economic incentives made the problem inevitable.
ESPN
ESPN is the sole media rights holder to the College Football Playoff. They paid billions for exclusive access, and they’ve built an entire media apparatus to justify that investment. They broadcast (or sublicense) all the playoff games and host countless shows debating and previewing the playoffs. They also own the SEC Network and ACC Network, giving them direct financial interest in those conferences’ success.
During the regular season, ESPN shares broadcast rights with Fox, NBC, CBS, etc. But the playoff is theirs alone. Every playoff game, every playoff selection show, every minute of playoff coverage generates revenue ESPN doesn’t have to split. So, from a pure profit standpoint, devaluing the regular season for the benefit of the playoffs makes sense. Why hype a Conference Championship game Fox is broadcasting when you can debate playoff positioning instead?
I was watching ESPN on Wednesday when I realized how far this had gone. ESPN analysts were discussing how Indiana vs. Ohio State was virtually pointless. The argument is that both teams will stay at #1 and #2 in the rankings regardless and receive byes.
#1 versus #2. Both are undefeated. The winning QB likely takes the Heisman. One of college football’s bluest bloods against a program having its best season in 70 years. It’s as “Game of the Century” as “Game of the Century” gets, and ESPN is talking about how it’s pointless…while not even sending College GameDay there.
ESPN has built weekly shows dedicated to the bracket. They turned their commentators into selection committee surrogates, constantly ranking teams instead of talking about the X’s and O’s or weird, wild stories that used to drive college football. It doesn’t feel like coverage of college football anymore; it feels like coverage of a selection process. And because ESPN controls so much of college football media, their framing becomes the only framing.
All this matters because fans adapt to what they’re told is important. When ESPN frames every game through playoff implications, when they spend all week hyping bracket scenarios instead of rivalry games, that reshapes fan psychology over time. You can’t sustain organic passion for something the entire media apparatus is telling you doesn’t matter in the big picture. Eventually, fans internalize it.
Consequences
Fan passion alone can’t sustain traditions. Traditions need institutional support: games that actually happen, not rivalries eliminated by realignment. They need players and coaches who treat them as important, not programs declining bowl games entirely. Conference realignment has already proved this by killing regionality because schools chased TV deals.
And now the playoff is coming for what’s left. The four-team playoff hurt bowl games. The 12-team playoff has all but killed them and is slowly doing the same to conference championships. This week, BYU dropped in the rankings because they lost their conference championship game. In fact, since the CFP was invented, the Alabama this season is the only team to lose in the conference championship and not drop. So if a championship can hurt your playoff seeding more than help it, why play one? The discussions are already there, and it’s not hard to imagine power conferences eliminating them within a few years.
As an Oklahoma fan, I remember the 2020 season. We lost our first two Big 12 games, and playoff hopes vanished before October. But that year was unforgettable: a four-overtime Red River shootout, crushing Oklahoma State in Bedlam, revenge against Brock Purdy and Iowa State in the Big 12 Championship, and then dismantling the Florida in the Cotton Bowl. Not one second had anything to do with the playoff, and it was still my favorite season.
On Sunday, Notre Dame declined its bowl berth after missing the playoff. If a program whose entire brand is built on tradition and independence won’t play a bowl game, what does that signal to the rest of the country? Well, Iowa State and Kansas State are also declining bowl berths.
The pursuit of ‘the best’ was never the point of college football. It was a sport defined by the plural, not the singular, dozens of narratives mattering simultaneously. The minute everything had to feed into one definitive answer, the rest stopped mattering. The regionality, the chaos, the possibility that a 9–3 season could be triumphant, all were sacrificed for a single championship narrative.
College football is becoming a closed system of 20–30 programs playing for one trophy while everyone else exists as content filler. And there’s no evidence that anyone with power is going to choose the sport’s long-term health over short-term profit.
Sam Weitzman-Kurker can be reached at sweitzmankur@wesleyan.edu.
Leave a Reply