Well there are a TON of baseball nerd/lovers who play Strat religiously. Most of them are older and all that, but still.
I know for a fact in every college town in the south, a college football game that was easy to play would sell out completely, as fast as you could stock it. If it has NCAA licensing, though. Put it in the campus bookstores, Walmart, wherever.
If the game is too tedious and gets bogged down in multiple dice rolls or turning pages in a booklet, then you'll have zero mass-audience customership.
Yes, NFL is king, but there are tons of college football fans out there. And while the baseball card/dice games are big, football is less so, and college football is barely on the map. The near total lack of competition is what makes this such a potential great idea. Strat-O-Matic makes a college football game, but it's mostly online and looks awful to me. They have 2016 college football, so I assume it's sort of generic, without the player's names. Plus it's $59, which is nuts.
There's 2 things preventing a college football cards/dice game from being a thing:
1 - the existing game stink
2 - the licensing thing
You know everyone has one of those Monopoly games of their school - and nobody wants to sit around and play Monopoly - but they sell, because they're the University of wherever and there's real places as properties.
Well, if my game only uses players from the past, but the actual players, then we don't worry about the EA Sports licensing issue they ran into. But we'd have past national champions, and if someday a company mass-produced this, we could have every season for every school, so if an OSU fan is particular to the 1996 Buckeyes that didn't win it all, but were still great, he could play as that team and have it go up against the 96 Gators or the 95 Huskers and see how they perform.
You'd be able to play out the what-if scenarios college football inundated us with, pre-BCS, especially. But it's just fun seeing if '92 Bama's D could hold fast against Vince Young and '05 Texas.