I love college football. Let me get that out of the way before everyone starts yelling at me. I love Saturdays in the fall. I love rivalries, fight songs, marching bands, tailgating, ridiculous traditions, huge upsets and sitting down with a beer believing that maybe—just maybe—this will finally be UCLA’s year. And yes, I realize how ridiculous that last part sounds.
But lately, I find myself wondering what the hell is happening to college football. The sport has changed dramatically in a very short period of time. Some of those changes were necessary. College athletes deserved more freedom and a greater share of the enormous amount of money being generated around them. Technology was supposed to make officiating more accurate. Conference changes were supposedly going to create bigger and better matchups. Yet somehow, with all these improvements, college football increasingly feels like it is forgetting about one fairly important group of people: the fans.
So grab a beer. I have five complaints.
5. A Three-Hour Football Game Somehow Takes Four Hours
Here’s a typical Saturday afternoon: kickoff, commercial, three plays, commercial, touchdown, commercial, extra point, commercial, kickoff, commercial, replay review, commercial. At some point you begin wondering whether you’re watching a football game interrupted by commercials or commercials occasionally interrupted by football.
I understand television pays the bills. Those enormous media contracts are one of the reasons college football has become the financial monster it is today. But there has to be a point where the product itself—and the experience of the people watching it—matters. Fans in the stadium sit around waiting for television. Fans at home reach for their phones because nothing is happening. Momentum disappears. Games stretch deeper and deeper into the afternoon or evening.
And there is something especially irritating about being physically at a game, watching players stand around on the field because some television network somewhere isn’t finished selling us insurance, trucks and fast food. There is, however, one obvious advantage: you have plenty of time to get another beer.
4. Conference Realignment Has Become Ridiculous
UCLA is in the Big Ten. I still have to say that occasionally just to hear how stupid it sounds. UCLA and USC left the Pac-12 for a conference historically centered in the Midwest. Stanford and Cal ended up in the ACC—the Atlantic Coast Conference. Stanford. California. Atlantic Coast. Sure.
I understand why it happened. Television contracts. Money. National audiences. Bigger matchups. But college football used to make geographic sense. Conferences created regional identities. Rivalries developed because schools were connected by geography and history. Fans could actually travel to road games without needing a cross-country flight and three days off work.
Now conference names barely mean anything. Every time somebody explains why all of this is actually wonderful for college football, I keep coming back to the same question: Wonderful for whom? Because I’m pretty sure nobody sitting in the Rose Bowl ever thought, You know what would make UCLA football better? More conference games against teams 2,500 miles away.
3. NIL Changed the Game—and We’re Still Pretending It Didn’t
Let me be clear about this one: I don’t have a problem with college athletes making money. For decades, universities, conferences, television networks, apparel companies and plenty of other people made enormous amounts of money from college football while the athletes themselves were severely restricted in how they could profit from their own names and popularity and that needed to change.
But can we stop pretending that what we have now resembles traditional amateur college athletics? NIL deals, revenue sharing, collectives, transfer negotiations and increasingly professionalized roster management have created something that looks an awful lot like professional sports—except it’s attached to universities.
Maybe that’s simply what college football is now. Fine. But then let’s be honest about what we’ve created. We seem to want NFL economics, college traditions and amateur-sports nostalgia all at the same time, and I’m not convinced those things can coexist forever. Again, I keep coming back to the fan. When money becomes the driving force behind nearly every major decision in the sport, what happens to the traditions and relationships that made people care about college football in the first place?
2. The Transfer Portal Has Turned College Football Into Free Agency: Who’s on My Team Again?
Remember when you learned the players on your college football team and expected most of them to still be there the following season? That was fun.
The transfer portal has completely changed the relationship between players, schools and fans. Players can move from one major program to another, sometimes more than once, and rosters can change so dramatically from season to season that you practically need a study guide before the opener.
As a UCLA fan, I’m watching this happen in real time with Nico Iamaleava. He played at Tennessee, entered the portal and ended up at UCLA. And for the record, I like Nico. He’s Hawaiian, so there’s a part of me that really wants to see this kid succeed. I’m just still waiting to understand all the hype.
I saw potential at Tennessee. I’ve seen athleticism. I’ve seen flashes of what everyone keeps telling me is there. But I haven’t consistently watched him and thought, Ohhh, now I get it. Maybe UCLA will be where everything clicks. I hope it is. And this really isn’t about Nico. Players absolutely should have the freedom to leave a situation that isn’t working for them. Coaches have been leaving programs for better opportunities forever, so expecting athletes to have no choices of their own never made much sense.
But have we swung so far in the opposite direction that college football now has its own version of free agency? When players can come and go so easily, coaches jump programs and entire rosters can transform almost overnight, it becomes harder for fans to feel connected to the actual people wearing the uniform.
1. Replay, Targeting and Apparently a Clock We Can’t See
This may be the one that drives me the craziest because now I’m not always sure the fans, analysts and officials are even watching the same game.
The Washington State–Washington game offered a perfect example of how complicated college football officiating has become: targeting. The play went to review, the analysts went back and forth trying to explain what did or did not constitute targeting, and the whole thing seemed to take forever. At some point, listening to the different interpretations, I found myself wondering whether any of us actually knows what targeting is anymore. If the people paid to explain the rule need that much time to figure out whether we just watched it, how is the average fan supposed to know?
In that case, however, I think the officials ultimately got it right. The Washington player was called for targeting and ejected. Replay did what replay is supposed to do: it slowed down a difficult play, applied the rule and got the call right. But it still illustrated the larger problem.
College football has accumulated so many rules, exceptions, interpretations and replay procedures that sometimes watching everyone figure out what happened takes nearly as long as the play itself. And when the analysts explaining the rule can’t even seem to agree on what we’re looking at, maybe the problem isn’t the fans. Maybe it’s the rule. After replay, officials determined that one second should be put back on the clock. Michigan got another play, threw another Hail Mary, caught it for a touchdown and won 13–12.
Then came the explanations. I love the narratives some networks are trying to sell and expect us to believe, nobody is that naive anymore. The Big Ten said its replay system determined that a Western Michigan defender who had established himself out of bounds touched the football with one second remaining, which made the ball dead at that point. The conference also explained that the replay cameras—including a camera focused directly on the stadium clock—had been synchronized before the game. Okay? I’m sorry. I’m not buying it.
Except NBC rules analyst Terry McAulay was confused, too. According to McAulay, NBC’s producer told him their clock was synchronized with the stadium clock, yet the clock viewers were watching reached zero while the football was still in the air. So apparently we have a broadcast clock, a stadium clock and a synchronized replay view, and somehow the one that mattered found a second the rest of us couldn’t see.
My problem is bigger than whether one particular official made the technically correct interpretation of a rule. Replay was supposed to make things clearer. Instead, we watched the clock reach 0:00, watched the pass fall incomplete, watched Western Michigan celebrate and then were essentially told that what we had just watched wasn’t actually what happened. If fans can’t trust the clock they’re watching, what exactly are we watching? Replay was supposed to remove doubt from football. Instead, apparently even 0:00 doesn’t necessarily mean zero.
Final Thoughts: And Somehow, We Still Love It
Here’s the irritating part. After everything I just complained about, you know what I’ll be doing next Saturday?
Watching college football. Because underneath the replay reviews, transfer portal, NIL money, conference nonsense and approximately 4,000 commercials, there is still something about college football that I absolutely love.
There’s nothing quite like a college football Saturday: the bands, student sections, traditions passed down through generations, rivalries that make otherwise rational adults behave like lunatics, a packed stadium erupting after a touchdown and an underdog knocking off a powerhouse nobody thought they could beat. That’s the college football I don’t want us to lose.
Maybe that’s really what frustrates me about all these changes. I’m not complaining because I hate college football. I’m complaining because I love it. When the sport becomes increasingly driven by television contracts, conference money, replay technology, player movement and decisions made far away from the people actually watching the game, I wonder whether anyone running college football remembers why millions of us fell in love with it in the first place.
Which brings me to Jerry Seinfeld. Years ago, he joked about the absurdity of sports fandom when players constantly move from team to team. At some point, we’re really just cheering for the colors. At the time, he was talking about professional sports. College football seems determined to prove his point: Players transfer. Coaches leave. Conferences change. The quarterback you cheered for last season can be wearing another school’s colors this season, while someone you rooted against can suddenly be wearing yours. Yet there we are every Saturday, wearing the same hats and shirts and cheering for the same colors.
Maybe Seinfeld was right. And apparently, mine will always be blue and gold. Maybe college football isn’t ruined yet. But could everyone please stop trying so hard? And while you’re at it, somebody explain that extra second in Michigan to me again.
Actually, never mind.
Just pass me a beer.
**Author’s note: By the time I completed this article, I had already witnessed another example of exactly what I’m talking about. Wisconsin muffed a kickoff return, and Notre Dame recovered the football. However, on replay, it appeared that the Notre Dame player did not have control of the ball before his foot went out of bounds. The officials reviewed the play and upheld the original ruling, despite all three analysts agreeing that there appeared to be clear, visible evidence that the Notre Dame player’s foot was out of bounds before he had control of the football.
For me, this only adds to the frustration. When a Top 10 program with enormous money, influence, and national visibility benefits from a call like this—even when the replay appears to show otherwise—it becomes increasingly difficult not to question whether the biggest programs are going to continue getting the calls. I love college football, but I’m not sure how long I can subscribe to this version of the game when there is clear visual evidence to the contrary. If replay cannot overturn a call when the evidence appears that obvious, then what exactly is replay for?
