How the Super Bowl stole football’s soul Profit has replaced college pride

For Americans, bigger is always better. We “go big or go home”. Big Pharma makes our medicine and Big Tech builds our phones. We wash down Big Macs with Big Gulps and jam to Biggie Smalls. College football is much the same. “Big four” bowl games once rang in the New Year, and even now our “Big Ten” represent the best university teams in the land. But then, in 1967, big became supersized, when the National Football League (NFL) premiered the Super Bowl between America’s top two professional sides.

To this day, only the 1969 Moon landing has drawn more American eyeballs than the Super Bowl, with the 57th set to be played between the Philadelphia Eagles and the Kansas City Chiefs on Sunday night. Now, though, the old college teams want to attract the eyeballs too, together with the billions in advertising revenue they inevitably bring. In practice, that means marketers, and trainers, and wages, and the end of an amateur tradition that’s survived, in one form or another, since the end of the Civil War.

This matters, and not merely in the way it transforms college football into a disfigured, commercialised echo of the NFL. For in the professionalisation of university sport, there’s a broader story too. I mean how, in modern America, money burrows into every facet of life, a process that squashes the variety from our continent-wide culture — even as it hints at the hard limits of our big-is-best mentality.

Americans love competition. Every year, 100 million of us attend a professional baseball, football, hockey or basketball game. Yet in this sports-crazed republic, amateur college football is distinct — not least in the passion of its fans. In 2024, the 10 highest-rated games had a collective TV viewership of 122 million, while 31 teams averaged a remarkable 100% in-person attendance rate. Yet even these numbers don’t really do the sport justice. Visit somewhere like the University of Alabama and you’ll soon see what I mean. Starting at breakfast, 100,000 fans get stuffed and buzzed at “tailgate” parties outside the ground. Expect an orgy of beer, hickory-fired ribs and Krispy Kreme donuts. Once you’re good and full, dash into the “Walk of Champions”, where fans greet the team as they enter Bryant-Denny Stadium. You’ve already had a packed day, and it is not even kickoff.

How, then, to explain this mania, one that fires spasms of emotion from Alaska to Maine? For Kurt Kemper, the answer begins less with the teams — and more with the universities that host them. “College, to Americans, is synonymous with the middle class,” argues Kemper, a professor of American history at Dakota State University. “College football is an idealised part of the college experience.” That’s partly a function of history. Rutgers played Princeton in the first-ever college football game way back in 1869. Today, though, college football is mostly a working-class game, one particularly popular among African-Americans. It doubtless helps, Kemper adds, that university, and university football, have long been admired as engines of social mobility. Compared to their classmates, football stars disproportionately hail from disadvantaged backgrounds, and graduate at higher rates than average.

In the end, though, college football is about more than a path to a picket fence. As Randy Roberts, a Purdue University historian explains, the institution ultimately speaks to America’s bewildering range of regional identities. Who you root for doesn’t just denote your alma mater: but rather your local sensibility and class. Forget those Alabama ribs — at Presbyterian College, in South Carolina, the team mascot is a Scottish highlander, blasting the bagpipes as he leads the team on. In America’s heartland, meanwhile, teams are famed for embracing the Midwest’s agricultural heritage. In Wisconsin, for instance, fans wear cheese hats on their heads, appropriate enough in the Dairy State. In Nebraska, for its part, supporters swap camembert for corn. Little wonder their team is nicknamed the Cornhuskers.

I don’t wish to insult readers in Madison or Lincoln — but this regional spirit is undoubtedly clearest at Appalachian State University. Nestled amid the hills and hollers of Boone, a hardscrabble town in North Carolina’s High Country, App State boasts the highest average attendance percentage in college football: a spectacular 115.78%. To zoom past capacity, students cram onto the “Grassy Hill” overlooking the field. They’re joined by 25,000 alums, who drive hours down treacherous two-lane highways to return “home” for six Saturdays every fall. Between the third and fourth quarter, millionaires, college kids, and working-class locals all celebrate their rough-hewn identity through a 35,000-person sing-along of an iconic rock-country anthem.

For Adam Cole, none of this is surprising. “Maybe you love your hometown, maybe you hate it,” says the beat reporter covering college football in the southeast. “But it sticks with you.” It’s a love that can easily veer into hatred. A case in point is when the University of Michigan plays their next door neighbour and Big Ten nemesis Ohio State University, in a matchup ominously known as “The Game”. In one recent meeting, the players started a melee, a battle complete with pepper spray. He’s never got quite that angry, but Cole understands the red mist himself. A native of Topeka, Kansas, he once overheard a passenger at an airport insult a local university. As he puts it: “It took everything in me not to say, ‘Hey fucker, don’t talk about my town!’”

Now, though, this lively amateurism is threatened — by the mighty greenback. Already, the top 10 grossing college football programmes collectively earn $571 million a year, largely through free media exposure when big games are shown on TV. It’s a bonanza that smaller teams can sometimes grasp at too. In 2007, for instance, Appalachian State shocked the college football world by defeating the University of Michigan. Practically overnight, enrolment jumped by 6,000. No wonder Joey Jones, the Appalachian State football team’s director of strategic communications, calls college football the “front porch” of his university.

With figures like these floating about, it’s equally unsurprising that cash now stalks other corners of college football too. For decades, student-athletes were mostly unpaid. All they could expect was paid tuition and a tiny dorm room, alongside drab cafeteria meals. But, in 2015, federal courts finally cut students in on the action. These days, college athletes secure compensation via “Name, Image, and Likeness” (NIL) deals. By appearing in commercials, or signing a jersey, a top-flight college quarterback can earn $1 million a year; elite teams altogether cost upwards of $10 million. All the while, universities increasingly employ “general managers” to raise money from wealthy donors and ink deals with the private sector.

There’s plenty more where that came from. Since the launch of an NFL-style playoff competition, in 2014, a system that’s since expanded to 12 teams, the biggest universities together gorge on media deals together worth $7.8 billion. And with a gaggle of lesser schools keen to get in on the action, the top sides have fought to control their monopoly by forming into 11 mega-conferences. Strikingly, these groupings no longer correspond by region: the Big Ten has transcended its Midwestern roots to encompass 20 schools, spanning from Jersey to Cali, securing it a media footprint in five of the nation’s seven biggest markets.

With so many potential viewers, the Big Ten TV network fills the coffers of its members with $100 million a year. Yet if that makes general managers rich, and ensures students are fairly remunerated, it’s also having a real impact on how college football actually feels from the stands. One good example — you might almost call it NFL-lite — came last month. One chilly Monday evening, the Fighting Irish of Notre Dame played the Ohio State Buckeyes in what’s increasingly known as the “Super Bowl” of college football. Each team bagged a cool $20 million from the game, but beyond the dollars and cents, the professionalisation practically oozed from the touchline. Players and coaches are hired guns who move from team to team in search of greater pay. Will Howard, Ohio’s winning quarterback, had just transferred from Kansas State the previous January. Days after Ohio State’s victory, the team’s defensive coordinator jumped ship to Pennsylvania State, lured by an annual paycheck worth $3.2 million.

It goes without saying, meanwhile, that those mega-conferences are bringing their own changes. “Conferences are losing college football’s parochialism,” says Roberts, adding that the passion animating games like the Ole Miss-Mississippi State “Egg Bowl” is ultimately down to the narcissism of small differences. Kemper agrees. Until the inception of the college football playoff, he suggests that crowning a national champion wasn’t really the sport’s primary aim. Rather, beating a rival defined a “winning” season. Nowadays, though, with teams duking it out for a national trophy, college football risks becoming a clinical, antiseptic game, one devoid of the parochial hatreds learnt at your grandfather’s knee.

Of course, this heady blend of nationalisation and money isn’t limited to college football. Post-1945 America has been standardised by transport and telecoms, which together flatten regional accents, dump regional foods, and altogether homogenise the American experience. As late as the Carter presidency, you could visit Nebraska to watch the Cornhuskers, munching a runza from a dairy bar as you went. No longer, even as Kemper argues that the arrival of a winner-takes-all college Super Bowl speaks to a broader economic model that lavishes rewards upon a select few. “In the old system,” he says, “10-15 teams finished a season feeling like a winner. In the new system there is one winner.”

To be fair, greed has yet to fully crush the college game. “Tough people who work with their hands and football is their way out,” is how Roberts characterises it. “Football is a tough game. You see where the players are from.” At Appalachian State, certainly, that toughness is epitomised by quarterback Chase Brice. Failing to achieve on-field success at two bigger schools, the burly blonde transferred here in 2021. Self-effacing and eager for success, Jones says that the mountain people here “saw something of themselves” in the 27-year-old Georgian.

That’s just as well — for college football can still be special. On 7 September, 2022, Appalachian State hosted ESPN’s College GameDay show. Broadcast live from the university’s campus, it brought the university $500 million dollars in free advertising. Not that the fans cared much about that, as tiny Boone became the centre of the football universe. A back-and-forth game against a conference rival came down to one final play. Behind two points, with two seconds remaining, Brice heaved a 53-yard “Hail Mary” touchdown for a remarkable victory. The crowd exploded. Yet amid the mayhem, Brice, the star quarterback on the national stage, ran straight past reporters. Instead, he rushed to the student section of the stands, where he helped classmates climb down onto the field. A wonderfully intimate moment, amid a sport that grows and grows.

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