Perhaps the BEST B1G Forum anywhere, here at College Football Fan Site, CFB51!!!

From another thread... Something that I wanted to delve into as its own thing:

Yep. But as I've pointed out for years now... The CFP has sucked all the air out of the room, so the old goal for a school like Purdue, i.e. a winning season, a bowl game, and hopefully beating your rival, is now worthless. And with the transfer portal and NIL, the new goal--getting to, and not getting embarrassed in, the CFP--is unattainable b/c you can just expect any star you manage to recruit and develop to take off and find brighter lights and more $$$.

So... Hope y'all enjoy your sport going forward. The rest of us will slowly just lose interest and do something else with our lives...

A response:

In some of these spaces, people are very interested in letting media people who they claim to think are idiots define what they find joy in and send them into a pity party.

Like the former First Lady told us, you can just say no.

And as the response wasn't directly quoting me, and there was confusion what was meant, a follow-up:

It was somewhat in response to something our Purdue friend said about non-playoff things feeling worthless. Which is a matter of one’s own perspective, not changing the game.

I’ll be honest, I was scanning, so it’s not in the flow of the rest of the thread. Don’t mind folks bothered by the churn. I find it a little funny because fans have historically wanted change when things are actually happening, but a level of (unrealistic) predictability year-over-year.

Thought perhaps I should explain and defend my position a little here:

Sports fandom is a bit of a strange and irrational thing. After all, there's no real reason that someone in Cleveland should be a Browns fan. I mean, unless they play for the team and are getting paid, the Browns are just a collection of people who work for the Cleveland Browns organization in the service of entertainment. Ultimately it would be just as rational for someone from Cleveland to be a Bengals fan, or a Lions fan, or a Dolphins fan. The only "logical" reason that someone from Cleveland might root for the Browns is that they live in Cleveland and it's the "local" team... But for many folks in the Cleveland area the fact that they live in Cleveland is purely an accident, determined for them by their parents having lived there when they were born, and thus living in Cleveland is as accidental as a football team named the Browns also happening to be in Cleveland.

Obviously, for a sports fan--short for "fanatic"--to become rather rabidly partisan for a team comes from something else. It comes from the fact that a sports team is something that we've built as an emotional, shared, experience. In Cleveland, that's being surrounded by people who are fans, with whom you share the [rare] wins as well as the [constant] disappointment. Even the struggles help cement those emotional bonds, which is why we all look down on fair-weather fans. Standing together during the hard times makes celebrating the good times ever more sweet. 

I didn't grow up a Purdue fan. I grew up in Chicago (a pro sports town) to parents who went to colleges that didn't have football teams and didn't have that experience. College football was literally something I never thought about. That led to my freshman year not having tickets, and largely not even realizing that football was happening on Saturdays. My fandom didn't start until my sophomore year, where I had joined a fraternity and got tickets in our seating block. The communal experience on game day is what built that fandom. The pregame tailgates on Slayter Hill for home games. Watching away games on a Saturday in the fraternity house with my buddies. Purdue football became something that had meaning, because the people I experienced it with made it meaningful. And yeah, Purdue's not [ever] going to be national champs, but on any given Saturday, we could beat anyone. Especially in the Tiller/Brees era. You know you might be down two TDs in the 4th, but you also knew anything can happen, and sometimes does. Hope is a hell of a drug.

But this doesn't mean that Purdue fandom is just forever tattooed on my soul. Fandom isn't innate. It's something that we must develop and nurture. It's ultimately irrational, so we have to continually find a reason to care.

And I'm having difficulty finding reasons to care any more.

Part of that is living 2000 miles from campus in a place that I'm not surrounded by many people who actually care about college football at all, much less Purdue fans. I don't have that "communal" aspect outside of this place--and this place isn't much about Purdue for me any more. These days CFB51 is about a bunch of old friends shooting the breeze [even if I haven't met anyone except one Boiler fan in person], and football is just sort of a backdrop for that now.

But another part of that is that college football is changing in ways that make it a lot less worthy of caring.

The College Football Playoff, as I've said, has sucked all the air out of the room. It's not the only reason I'm having trouble caring, but for the 100+ teams in CFB that have no realistic national championship aspirations, the playoff is irrelevant to us but it's literally the only thing that the college football media talks about. Now, the concern BAB brings up is that I shouldn't base my enjoyment on what college football mediots say, and he's right. But it also seems like it's not something that other college football fans care about either. And to the extent that college football fandom is built around a communal experience, that means something. Look at this forum--how many discussions did we used to have about bowl projections, about whether a team could get to 6 wins and go, about where they'd go and the bowl pecking order? How many did we have this year? I count 1--and that was just the Wisconsin fans lamenting the end of their bowl streak. Even on this board, nobody cares about non-CFP bowls. And it's just year 1 of the playoff. I have to think it will get worse over time, and bowls will continue to fade into obscurity.

But it's bigger... The changes to the college football landscape are also driving this. As a non-helmet fan, there was some dignity to battling for a winning season and a bowl. And a lot of it was that even if we had lower aspirations, we had players who came and wore the uniform and battled for each other. They cared if they won a bowl game. That's broken too.

It's easier to root for a team when you know these kids chose to proudly wear the Boilermaker moniker. Yeah, maybe Ohio State and Michigan didn't want them, and maybe they're salty for the fact that they are "only" at Purdue, with a giant chip on their shoulder. Or maybe they were recruited by a bunch of MAC schools and Purdue showed interest, and they felt like a diamond in the rough because of it, and want to make good on the fact that someone saw something in them that nobody else at this level did. But once they signed that NLI and came to West Lafayette, they were invested in the same thing that the fans were invested in--the team. But that's broken. It seems that everyone's in it for themselves and nobody cares about the team, especially come bowl time.

Now, the players increasingly don't even want to play in the bowl games. A group [smaller for a school like Purdue] opt out because they've declared for the draft and don't want to get injured. A larger number of players opt out because they're in the portal hoping for NIL riches elsewhere. Hell, didn't WSU have 32 players opt out for the portal this year, for a team that MADE a bowl game? If the players don't care enough to complete the season and show up for the bowl game, why should the fans? The players know it's not the CFP, and they don't care. So why don't the fans follow suit because it's not the CFP, and not care?

It seems that college football is becoming a single-season transactional world of perennial free agency. Maybe the players never cared about the name on the front of their uniform like the fans do. But in the old world, they at least seemed to care. And honestly, if you are going to be spending four years (or five with a redshirt) with the same team, I think you grow to care about the team. You go to war with someone for nearly half a decade, and that guy is now your brother. If you know you might be gone by the next January, as a player are you going to build those relationships the same way?

So it becomes hard... Maybe if I lived in Indianapolis or Chicago and was hanging out with my Purdue friends, it might still be meaningful to me. But I don't have that. So I have to ask, what about Purdue football is still meaningful? Is it non-CFP bowl games? Not really--nobody cares, not the media, not the fans; not even the players. Is it the chance to make the CFP once every other decade? No, with our roster it's just going to result in pain; look at IU. Is it that I look at these kids as a representative of my university, a place that's meaningful to me? Not really; they're almost hired mercenaries at this point, always looking for a higher bidder. They'll bolt the second they can get a bag.

What made college football special--at least to me--might be gone. For a fan of a non-helmet team, all we are now is cannon fodder to rack up wins for the teams that are going to the Playoff. All we are now is a development farm team for those teams that are going to the Playoff, who can snatch whoever they want with big bags of NIL in the transfer portal era. And the Playoff--something meaningless to a non-helmet team--is the only meaningful thing now in the sport.

Being a fan of a non-helmet team has always been hard in college football. But my own struggles are not JUST a matter of personal perspective driven by mediots. They're partly caused by major changes to a sport that took away some of the joys of being a fan of a non-helmet team.

I've mentioned before that perhaps it's better to be a fan of say "K State".  You can enjoy the game, and the tail gating, and if you win that's great, if you lose no big deal, it's kind of relaxed fandom.

I was a Braves fan in the TBS days before they got pretty good.  I'd watch their antics, they'd go to Cincy for a four game series and IF they won one it was pretty neat.  It was a different kind of fun.  Then they went "worst to first" and the whole thing was just too tense and stressful, really.  I was kind of happier when they lost 100 games a year.

In CFB I happen to be a fan of a program that is doing well and it's the same kind of thing, almost too stressful at times.  So, maybe it's better to be a nonhelmet fan and revel in minor bowl games just for the joy of the sport without much stress.  And you can always think "Wait 'til next year!!!".

if the Hoosiers and the Cyclones can win 11 games

the boilers can win 11

their best season EVER and something to celebrate and be proud of?

Wild Bill learned that from Hayden Fry

So did Kirk

I think there are still some of the same highs for a non-helmet fan as there always were, even with that impossible gauntlet now at the end of the season.

:96:You could do what ISU and IU did and have your best season ever.  That's a real, tangible thing that goes down in the history books (ie - media guide).

:96:You could reach a #1 ranking during the season, a la 1990 Virginia or 2007 Missouri, despite not winding up near the top.

:96:You can upset a blueblood, and for bonus points, be their only loss of the season (as Purdue fans are well aware).

Now, yes, with no leader guiding things, college football itself is like a 16 year old driving a Ferrari.  That's bad (duh).  
NIL and the portal is a mess.  And while players are going both ways (from top teams to other teams and from other teams to top teams), it's uneven.  The best players from 'other' teams are going to top teams and (generally) the worst players from the top teams are going to 'other' teams to get some playing time.  Very uneven.
PLUS the non-helmets can't build on successes, as those players who caused it leave.  It sucks.  
A simple 2-year rule or something would fix it, but someone would have to propose it and everyone would have to buy in.  
And for non-playoff bowls, you'd have to have a widespread buy-in on players getting half for the regular season and the other half of their money for playing in the bowl.  End of opt-outs.
.
A larger issue that existed before all that is the number of bowls.  Many would say you can't have too many bowls, what's the harm, etc.  Well, when you have 10 of them, they're special.  When you have 40 of them, they're no longer special.  When you need to go shopping for sub-.500 teams to fill all the slots, HELLO, there's a problem.

Non-playoff bowls would feel more meaningful to EVERYONE if there were few of them.  Hell, people talked about relegation of programs, have relegation of bowls.  Whether it's by payout, attendance, or whatever, have 10 set bowls only, and the 9th and 10th ones may vary from year to year.  But the other 8 would be consistent and have 2 very good teams playing.  Special!!!

An even better fix would be to go back, have the old bowl system, and instead of the +1 game as needed that I've long advocated for, just have an automatic final 4 after the normal bowls.  A 4-team, post-bowls playoff.  The 4 teams may come from any of the limited number of bowls that occur, no slot automatic, but earned.  By a vote 

College football CAN be fixed, but it would take a Saban or someone to lead it.  We CAN construct something that worked from the past within the modern structure.  
And conferences need to stop adding just good programs.  Include a non-helmet for every helmet added.  That'd be a good start.

the Big Ten added a helmet, USC

and 3 non-helmets, Washington, UCLA, & Oregon as travel partners

I'd say USC and Oregon are big adds, and UW + UCLA as tagalongs.  Smart move.

Adding just Texas and OU wasn't a great plan, long-term.  It'd have been better with 2 others, like OKST + a KS school or a UNC/NCST + a VA school, something like that.

If you only add great programs, your existing great programs suffer.