Ratings madness is disrupting the sport’s traditions.
Credit: April Visuals
This season, the college football world has been openly obsessed with television ratings. The success of Deion Sanders in his first year at Colorado has been measured just as much by the Buffaloes’ incredible viewer numbers as by their performance on the field. Florida State is tweeting out that it has the highest ratings in its conference. Pat McAfee has repeatedly insulted Washington State, about to be left behind in the latest round of conference realignment, for the crime of not being popular or important enough to be worth his time.
We have a word for the attitude that popularity is the same as merit: poptimism.
And poptimism is even sillier than usual when applied to college football. The highest-quality football—and the most popular football—is in the NFL. College football entails watching college students, who have a tendency to do both some amazing things and some baffling and incomprehensible things. That’s the appeal of both the games that millions see and the games that thousands see.
But it’s easy to see why this attitude is spreading in college football circles. It’s spreading there for similar reasons that it spread in the world of music criticism. It spread along with the Internet, and, more specifically, the Internet’s ability to show how many people were actually clicking on any given piece. Any online publication not operating with a subscription model (and during the peak of poptimism several years ago very few were) is dependent on clicks. People click on criticism of the biggest pop stars out there, and they don’t click on whatever the jazz or indie rock critic is doing. And the sort of person who clicks on criticism of the biggest pop stars out there, especially those who will be loudest and most vocal about it, wants to read something positive. Of course a school of criticism emerged perfectly suited to this environment, one that made its biggest fault according to traditional standards of criticism—equating popularity and quality—a virtue.
The college football media, like sports media generally, is in a similar position as those music websites. Every major college football section has gone all-in on coverage of Deion Sanders despite Colorado football having been bad for the past 20 years because people keep reading about him. And Sanders has gotten attention on shows like SportsCenter and First Take in a way that college football rarely does. In contrast, SB Nation, which I regarded as the best college football website because it was willing to cover the whole sport and not just the few teams at the top, lost basically all of its talent as a result of Vox Media layoffs in 2020 and has never recovered. Even ESPN, which for so long seemed invulnerable, has undergone several rounds of layoffs in the past decade. So it’s no surprise that a host like Pat McAfee wants to use his position on College GameDay, a show that has historically celebrated the entirety of college football, to attack Washington State, a program with a special connection to College GameDay, for not being much of a ratings draw. He has unthinkingly internalized the attitudes driving decisions about what to cover. He is a poptimist.
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But that’s the media side. Why does Florida State want to make people aware how many people watch its games? The schools are on the receiving end of the media poptimism, especially that of the TV networks who pay the conferences for their broadcasting rights. And they pay a lot for the teams at the top of the sport—the Big Ten signed a 7-year, $7 billion media rights deal last year. The most recent waves of conference realignment were driven by the networks to create more games between the biggest brands in the sport; if that leaves some teams behind, they don’t care. If that destroys the conference that has always been the top tier of West Coast football, they don’t care. (Again, look at Washington State.) And Florida State is concerned that the revenue gap between it and other national championship contenders will grow so big that it can’t compete unless it gets into a conference that will pay it more money. In other words, they need to convince a TV network that they’re worth it, and the ratings are the only evidence that matters. And it isn’t just Florida State. All the decisions made as part of realignment in the past few years were driven either by the desire to make more money from TV rights or to hold on to some of the money currently being made. Rivalries don’t matter. History doesn’t matter. Geographical logic doesn’t matter. The spirit of college football doesn’t matter. The only thing that matters is popularity, and it alone matters because it alone can be turned into money. And so college football has given birth to its own kind of poptimism.
The worst excesses of poptimism in music have gone into retreat. Michael Hann listed two of them as follows: “Commercial success, in and of itself, should be taken as at least one of the markers of quality” and “contrivance and cynicism might be elevated and celebrated, as evidence of the maker’s awareness of the game they are playing.” But they’re alive and well in college football. Look at the responses to the Florida State tweet if you don’t believe me. The response to this shameless cynicism from the school’s fans is unqualified support.
Whether this is sustainable is difficult to say. The TV networks seem to think so, but cable is rapidly declining and they’re still losing billions on streaming. And, as in many other ways, how well New York and Los Angeles understand Tuscaloosa and South Bend is an open question. The schools seem to think it’s sustainable, but they’re all fighting to climb over each other. The history of other sports that have made this bargain isn’t promising. NASCAR, acting under similar “poptimist” impulses, once tried to hold on to hardcore fans while gaining mass appeal and succeeded at neither. But that’s where college football and the media apparatus around it are. And, unless the incentives change, they’re stuck there.
Sourse: theamericanconservative.com
