College Football Is Evolving, ESPN Needs To Do The Same

The 2021 college football season is nearly over. If you are reading this on the day it comes out, then it is the night of the College Football Playoff National Championship Game. ESPN will again pull out all of the bells and whistles in hopes that it can manufacture greater interest for a game that doesn’t offer any geographic diversity and has already been played once this season.

No network, business or individual holds as big of a stake in this sport as ESPN does. Thanks to the package of linear cable networks and a slew of streams on both the ESPN app and ESPN+, we are so far removed from the days of maybe getting to see your favorite team on television twice or three times per year. It has never been easier to find the game you want to watch.

But ESPN and corporate parent Disney have a problem, and it is one they don’t have any real control over. The Southeast has a stranglehold on the sport and it is choking the life out of fandom on a national level.

You could argue that Disney’s investment in the SEC has at least a little bit to do with that. You can argue that College GameDay’s desire to be the Dabo Swinney Variety Hour is at least partially to blame. The reality is that there isn’t much Mickey Mouse or Jimmy Pitaro can do about Michigan being the number 2 team in the country and still not being very good. There is no time slot ESPN could put Notre Dame games on in that would convince Brian Kelly that the Irish were capable of competing with the Southern juggernauts that have run them over every time the Irish are in a position to win or play for a national championship.

ESPN can only control what it can control, and it isn’t even really doing a great job of that at the moment. Its presentation of college football has become stale and that is leading to some very loud accusations from other media outlets that the network and some of its marquee personalities are totally out of touch with the game in the modern day.

On Tuesday morning, in addition to headlines celebrating whichever coach walks away with a title, we will see a lot of looking ahead. The front page of ESPN.com’s college football section will feature a “Way Too Early Top 25” and lists of players and coaches to know before the 2022 season kicks off.

Maybe it is time ESPN does some looking ahead of its own. The transfer portal, NIL deals and conference realignment have turned college football into an entirely different sport than it was even just three years ago. So why is the Worldwide Leader still covering college football the same way it did in 2015?

The easiest change the network can make is to update the soundtrack of College GameDay. Every song the pregame show uses is around a decade old. I did some tracking. Here are some of the go-to songs with the year of their release:

• Big & Rich’s “Comin’ To Your City” from 2005
• Kid Rock’s “God Bless Saturday” from 2010
• Instrumental track my Shazaam identifies as “Silver Scrapes” from 2012
• Florida Georgia Line’s “This is How We Roll” from 2013
• Zac Brown Band’s “Homegrown” from 2015

Also, it’s not just old. It’s like 65 to 70% country. That list above is 80% country. If ESPN is concerned about where college football’s audience is coming from in the future, maybe it should try not exclusively packaging the game in music targeted for 40 and 50-year-old white women from Murfreesboro, Tennessee.

Next, ESPN needs to look at how Colin Cowherd and The Volume approach the game and then look at their own product. As soon as players were eligible to receive payment for the use of their name, image, and likeness, Cowherd and his team secured deals with members of Notre Dame’s football team and eventual Heisman Trophy winner Bryce Young to host original podcasts on the network.

Now, are the podcasts good? No, both of them are REALLY boring. But The Volume sensed a sea change in what it could offer college football fans and the network jumped on it.

ESPN, and College GameDay, in particular, have done just the opposite. Just look at the conversation that drew so much attention on New Year’s Eve, where Kirk Herbstreit and Desmond Howard took turns telling you how disappointed they are in today’s players. It was like two people, who each have an outsized influence on the sport, were taking time on national TV to tell you that you shouldn’t like it.

The Volume saw players being empowered and being given new opportunities and said “we should see what we can do with this.” It sure seems like College GameDay saw the same thing and decided to ask a veritable who’s who of coaches that aren’t as good as they used to be what they should be saying on air.

Fans, like the players Herbstreit and Howard have contempt for, are considerably smarter now and have access to so much more information about the sport. Fans have a connection to all of these players in a way they didn’t when Herbstreit and Howard were playing. The players, the great ones anyway, recognize they have more value than anyone else in the sport.

Nick Saban’s name may resonate, but if you were watching Alabama in 2021, it was because you wanted to see Will Anderson and Bryce Young. Either Lee Fitting and his crew don’t recognize that or are actively trying to fight against it. Both possibilities should be concerning.

Speaking of “outsized influence on the sport,” ESPN would be so much better served by embracing it rather than pretending it doesn’t exist. The network owns most of the postseason bowl games. It owns a chunk of the college football playoff. It has exclusive rights deals with two of the five power conferences and some sort of carriage agreement with every conference.

FLEX THAT INFLUENCE MUSCLE OCCASIONALLY!

If ESPN is hurt by players opting out of the meaningless bowl games, expand the playoff and make fewer bowl games meaningless. Build stars out of players outside of the SEC through NIL deals and preferential scheduling for their teams. Make their faces, stories, and talent inescapable. Take the bull by the horns and along with EA Sports, get the video game out there in a way that inspires the cult following it had a decade ago. That was as important a part of the nationalization of college football fandom as any star player or coach or any television deal.

College football isn’t a lost cause and ESPN isn’t actively killing it. I know the network and the people that cover the sport for it really do love the game. ESPN has the seat of power at the college football table. That has made it very easy to acquire and not necessary to innovate. But college football is evolving.

It is time for coverage of the sport to evolve too. Maybe NIL deals and the transfer portal are a little out of control right now, but that isn’t changing for the foreseeable future. The sport’s most powerful stakeholder should be smarter about the way it reacts because right now, it is sending the message that college football isn’t worth loving anymore.

Demetri Ravanos

Demetri Ravanos is a columnist and features writer for Barrett Media. He is also the creator of The Sports Podcast Festival, and a previous host on the Chewing Clock and Media Noise podcasts. He occasionally fills in on stations across the Carolinas in addition to hosting Panthers and College Football podcasts. His radio resume includes stops at WAVH and WZEW in Mobile, AL, WBPT in Birmingham, AL and WBBB, WPTK and WDNC in Raleigh, NC.

You can find him on Twitter @DemetriRavanos or reach him by email at DemetriTheGreek@gmail.com.