College football isn’t really college football anymore; it is now NFL Lite
Photo: Dylan Buell/Getty Images On Saturday afternoon, the college-football season begins in a location befitting this truly American sport: Dublin, Ireland. The Nebraska Cornhuskers will face the Northwestern Wildcats in the grand tradition that is the Aer Lingus Classic. The game kicks off “Week Zero,” the soft launch to the season that features mostly mid-tier, nationally irrelevant teams with modestly invested fanbases: the likes of Connecticut, North Carolina, and Illinois.
College football is actually older than professional football; it has been an American obsession for more than a century. But for the most part, it has been a regional one, confined to large swaths of the South as well as the upper Midwest and parts of California. The game has always maintained a local focus: You wanted to beat your nearby rival above all, and the idea of a “national championship” was considered professionalized and crass.
Just witness the seismic changes this money has already wrought. The Big Ten, attempting to sweeten the pot on its rights deal, added UCLA and Southern California earlier this summer, two schools that make no geographic sense for the conference, but which do allow access to a swath of the country that wouldn’t otherwise be interested in its TV network. That move was a response to the SEC bringing in Texas and Oklahoma for similar reasons.
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