Very often we read an interesting feature about college athletics we want to share with readers but want to give you the cliff notes, so consider this the first of a series of our perspective on stories we think relevant to Florida State.
You’ve read where television viewership for college football was up year over year, which is a very good thing but I think some people are gaslighting us when they equate viewership rising as “a sign college football is alive and well.”
Let me ask you as a college football consumer: Do you feel college football is alive and well?
The College Football Playoff (CFP) saw a 16% rise in viewership year over year and regular-season viewership increased by 4% based on Nielsen Big Data + Panel figures. Even ACC games on The CW experienced a 26% year-over-year growth. Please note: Nielsen’s new methodolgy admittedly inflates sports viewership numbers because Nielsen can now capture streaming and other viewers it could not in prior years. Thursday Night Football, for example, saw an 8 percent increase attributed to the improved methodology, so keep that in mind as you read on.
But viewership numbers are promising. The Miami-Indiana Championship game drew more than 30 million viewers, up 36 percent from the 2024 title game between Ohio State and Notre Dame. It was the second-most watched title game in CFP history (second to first ever playoff game with Ohio State and Oregon in 2015), and fourth in the past 30 years on any network, per ESPN.
It should be celebrated that a college football game was the most-watched non-NFL sporting event since the Cubs' Game 7 win against Cleveland in the 2016 World Series. The UM-IU Championship game beat every NBA Finals and every other World Series game in the past decade.
All good news. But is television viewership the best or only metric by which to measure the health of college football when the campus must fund the product for the network? Is the sport healthy for the schools when their cost of sales has never been higher and their customer’s trust - the ticket holder and donor - in the direction of the sport feels like it is falling lower?
Most fans I hear from don’t think college football is alive and well. So are people gaslighting us when using viewership as a sign the sport is “alive and well.”
Remember, viewership measures people not at the game, who didn’t buy a hot dog or Coke, and who may not be making any kind of contribution to the ballooning costs of the team they enjoy viewing. Seems to me viewership is a great measurement of the health of the network but not of the sport on America’s campuses.
The lion’s share of the athletic budget comes from ticket sales and donations, so wouldn’t average attendance at the game, and amount donated, be the gold standard measurement of the health of college football?
You’d be hard pressed to find an AD who believes viewership is as important to the health of his program as are attendance and donations to funding the program.
If you believe in trickle-down economics, then rising viewership is a good thing because all boats rise on a rising tide. Higher viewership means more money for the networks, and theoretically the profit will trickle down to the campuses who bear the burden of paying high-priced coaches every two weeks, as well as scholarships, NIL and revenue sharing with the stars of those broadcasts.
Attendance is critical
We don’t have credible numbers yet on 2025 donations compared to 2024, but according to D1 Ticker, a publication for athletics, average attendance was only slightly up (.376 percent) from 2024 to 2025, and up 3.19 percent over a five-year period (.64 percent per year).
In an era when college football and its fans are struggling to find equilibrium, the soft growth in attendance may feel better than expected but flat sales are not healthy with burgeoning costs.
If you are wondering about FSU’s numbers, D1 Ticker reported FSU’s average attendance in 2025 was 65,876 compared to 54,479 (Note: west sideline under construction) in 2024. The 2025 attendance surpassed the five-year average of 62,428.
Bowl attendance: Attendance at the 47 FBS postseason games was down 9 percent from the 2024-25 bowl season. Of the 44 bowls reporting attendance, 23 were down.
Why is this significant? People staying home is great for viewership but not healthy for the participating schools or the 40-plus cities and sponsors hosting bowls, whose original purpose was to promote tourism.
FSU still a TV brand: In spite of a 5-7 record, Florida State was a top 20 most-watched team, ranking between 9th and 14th based on various lists, with an average of between 4.3 million and 4.9 million viewers per game, the highest among all ACC teams. FSU-Alabama drew 10.7 million. That’s good news and one we’ll study in an upcoming issue.
A period of turmoil
Six years ago, I wondered why collegiate athletics walked into the anti-trust mine field rather than follow the precedented path professional sports blazed in the late 1970s that enabled collective bargaining agreements (CBAs). Owners and player representatives sat at the table and worked out salary caps, movement between teams. and many of the issues causing turmoil in college athletics today.
Smarter people than I wanted to “fight the good fight” because they wanted to preserve as much of amateurism as possible. Now, we’re hearing from athletic directors and head coaches who think a CBA may deliver them from the turmoil of the Wild West.
Yahoo Sports! Ross Dellenger saw the industry moving in this direction. In this thorough piece he penned prior to the 2025 season, Dellenger explains why ADs and coaches are rethinking their position but also examines why a CBA may be difficult to achieve, especially now that players and their agents may not want to come to the table.
The bullfrog and the happy place
We’ve endured one ugly NIL and transfer portal lawsuit after another - which are as irritating as sand in our swim trunks - but these lawsuits and cringeworthy moments serve a critical purpose.
My simple, non-lawyer mind sees this moment through a cartoon lens. Imagine a bullfrog sitting on the wildfire side of a creek that is too swift to swim and too wide to jump in a single bound. Instinctively the bullfrog will use a series of rocks and logs, jumping one to the other, until he makes it to the distant but safer bank.
College football is the bullfrog and the lawsuits and irritating moments are the rocks and logs that must be crossed for college football to land on the bank it legally must. So when you read about Dabo Swinney accusing Ole Miss head coach Pete Golding of tampering or Duke quarterback Darian Mensah breaching his agreement with the school, or FSU players announcing their “intent” to enter the portal, or future disturbing news, think about the bullfrog and know he’s making progress toward a happier place whether that’s a CBA or help from Washington.
The encroaching wildfire is moving the resistant
Dabo has been a conscientious objector to the transfer portal and that has allowed his fans to live in the past, where they could buy a Clemson jersey with their favorite playe'r’s name on the back, and trust that player would be on their campus for more than a year. I envied Clemson fans as Dabo immunized them from the pain everyone else has endured. But in doing so, Clemson fans believe Dabo also immunized them from playoff contention and they pushed Dabo to sign more transfer players.
But now the Tigers are feeling our pain with the brouhaha mentioned above regarding prized linebacker transfer Luke Ferrelli.
According to ESPN, “Swinney detailed a two-week process that followed in which Ferrelli visited Ole Miss and Clemson, agreed to a revenue-sharing contract with the Tigers, rented an apartment, purchased a car, enrolled in and attended classes, and had begun offseason workouts there.”
It’s high drama and you can read it in that ESPN story linked above. But as bad as all this is, and the closer the fire gets to home, it pushes college football another step closer to where it needs to get.
According to ESPN, Swinney even suggested collective bargaining would be a better alternative than the current status - a marked departure from a coach who had long argued against making student-athletes employees.
“I’ve always been against this idea of players as employees. But quite frankly that might be the only way to protect the collegiate model,” Swinney said. “To have two sides have some type of agreement so that you can have some rules that can actually be enforced because everybody’s agreed upon them.”
With the wildfire warming its rear, even resistant bullfrogs will make uncomfortable leaps.
Indiana’s victory breathes hope into us all
Indiana’s undisputed national championship is a hopeful moment for college football including FSU’s fans. In just two years Indiana went from the losingest team in college football history to winning the 2025 National Football Championship.
Walt Disney could not have written a better script.
The Hoosiers’ journey from worst to first should breathe hope into all college football fans. A well-coached team with only a handful of four-star prospects and armed with only an above average football and NIL budget, defeated a gauntlet of teams who have won 43 combined national championships. Indiana beat Penn State (2) for the Big10 title, Ohio State (9), Alabama (18) and Oregon (0) before defeating Darth Vader (5) in the national championship game.
And to brighten that smile, consider this, an SEC did not hoist the trophy into the shower of confetti, nor has the SEC even had a team in the championship game since 2022. For this we can be thankful.
And while there is likely to be more pain before college football makes the leap to a happier place, we are thankful that confetti was not orange or green.
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