In all this rush to realign college sports conferences based on football TV revenue potential, there seems to be something people are forgetting: college football is tribalist, and if our tribes are not on TV? We don’t adopt “new” tribes to root for and follow rabidly. The argument that this realignment creates “more big games” is off base, because if those “big games” don’t include a fan’s own school, they ain’t gonna watch.

You’d think people would have learned this with the demise of the Bowl Championship Series, which was so crooked in favor of the SEC that people just stopped watching. That led to the creation of the College Football Playoff, which is just as unpopular as the BCS was in its waning days. Hence the current scramble to expand it for the 2024 season, which now just looks like it will be the SEC and the B1G and not much else. Seriously.

College football is about a personal connection to a specific community (for most fans)—whether someone attended the school itself, their parents did, or they happen to live nearby even though they never went to college themselves … you know, like the entirety of the Confederate states that make up the SEC. But we digress in our crackshots at the South; honestly, college football fans don’t tune in to watch other teams.

This is generally why March Madness is so much better for TV ratings in the early rounds rather than the later rounds: when teams lose, only a small fraction of that team’s fans keep watching. Throw in the aforementioned issue of the same teams always seeming to end up in the championship rounds, and it’s why, more and more in our modern society, people tune out and find something better to do. Ho hum.

College football is headed into the proverbial shitter: it’s like the Akufo League scenario we outlined awhile ago. The masses will not want to watch Alabama, Georgia, Michigan, Notre Dame, Ohio State, Oklahoma, Texas, and USC all the time in the finals of the CFP. The tribalism effect is being ignored here, for sure, where the 98 percent just don’t care who is playing in the championship if it’s not their school/team.

For us, we are alums of several colleges across the nation; we only tune in to watch those teams, and sometimes, we don’t even do that if the team isn’t playing well. We own it. Are we common among the people out there? You betcha. The 2 percent is really about to discover it’s nothing without the rest of us.