ESPN is ruining college football

There is a lot to hate about the sport we love the most. If a die-hard college football fan had fallen into a coma in 2009, they wouldn't even recognize the sport that we follow in 2025. Conferences make no sense. TV networks control everything. We have a playoff now, players transfer on a whim, coaches make eight-figures a year, and players finally get a slice of the pie for themselves. The PAC-12 is dead. The Big East is a basketball-only museum piece. And something called James Madison is in the College Football Playoff.

This is not the sport that you once knew.

At its core, college football is still college football, and that is why we still love it. But with each passing year, it's getting harder and harder to find the tenets of what made us all fall in love with college football in the first place.

Nearly every college football fan has something they really dislike about the sport in 2025, and here is the uncomfortable truth:

Most of those problems trace back to the same place.

It's ESPN.

ESPN is slowly ruining college football, and they're getting away with it.

Exhibit A: The Longhorn Network and the First Earthquake

Allow me to present several pieces of key evidence that point to ESPN's destruction of the sport.

To understand how ESPN broke the sport, we will start with the Longhorn Network. In 2011, ESPN handed Texas a $300M deal for its very own channel. On the surface, the LHN was supposed to magnify smaller sports. But in reality, it was a nuclear device dropped in the middle of the Big 12. No other school in the league had a deal remotely close to this. The financial imbalance was so massive that it created an entirely new class system inside the conference.

Texas made more money from the Longhorn Network than most schools in the Big 12 made from all of their media rights combined. The Columbia Journalism Review wrote that ESPN had “obscured its own role” in the realignment chaos that followed. The Associated Press later observed that the Longhorn Network “sparked controversy” and “contributed to wider disruption” across the conference. ESPN heard complaints from all of the Big 12 member schools, but sat idly by, anxiously anticipating the fallout.

A&M, despite the fact that they were initially at least half-invited to join Texas on the Longhorn Network, hated LHN the most. They called it a direct recruiting advantage for Texas. They were furious when LHN said it planned to broadcast high school games that featured Texas recruits. A&M complained and made it known that they would be leaving the ever-expanding shadow of the University of Texas.

Missouri had also had enough. Missouri officials said the Big 12 was structurally unstable, and they weren't wrong. ESPN did not create that instability alone, but they didn't do anything to provide stabilization either. The conference refused to put any guardrails on LHN. Missouri saw the writing on the wall.

Nebraska had been complaining about Texas since the late 1990s. They hated the Big 12’s unequal revenue sharing. They hated Texas's scheduling influence. The LHN was the exclamation point at the end of the sentence.

Colorado bailed for the Pac-12. They had academic and geographic motivations too, but LHN was another large factor in the decision. Colorado officials privately admitted the Big 12 felt like a powder keg. They were not wrong.

The former Big 12 was a mess, of that there is no doubt. There was shaky leadership and overzealous ADs who had big egos and a lot of money in their pockets. It was a disaster in waiting for years.

Texas gets all the hate from former Big 12 schools, and they probably deserve that. But it was ESPN that was deepening the fault lines in the cracks of the foundation, and they weren't worried at all about what the ramifications might be.

Exhibit B: The College Football Playoff, ESPN’s Signature Creation

It was almost universally accepted that the BCS had flaws. In hindsight, those flaws were much smaller than they were made out to be. The flaw of the BCS was the number of games at the end of the season. But the narrative about the BCS was that all of it was terrible and it all needed to be scrapped.

When ESPN pushed the idea that the BCS was broken, most fans agreed. The BCS produced controversy every year. Fans demanded a playoff, and ESPN was more than happy to give it to them. But ESPN didn't plan on simply broadcasting a playoff that was brought to them; they saw the opportunity to control a playoff.

ESPN secured the rights to the College Football Playoff before the format was even finalized. They shaped the conversation that forced the BCS to die, and steered public opinion toward the idea that college football needed a full-blown bracket. ESPN was involved at every level.

One of the most widely agreed upon missteps of the playoff so far is the CFP Selection Committee. They meet each week in the second half of the season and release rankings every week. Those rankings are televised on ESPN and discussed by every outlet for the next week.

It creates a cluster of confusion and misunderstanding. The rankings pigeonhole the Committee into a corner because what was true three weeks ago has to be true today, too. Everything about the Selection Committee is almost universally hated.

It has become made-for-TV fodder. Committee members aren't owned by ESPN, but their data points and talking points came from ESPN. This year, ESPN commentators talked almost exclusively about Miami and Notre Dame comparisons, even though BYU was right between the two of them. BYU was left off the graphics on the ESPN telecast as if they didn't exist. But now that the CFP bracket is settled, ESPN personalities are saying the quiet part out loud.

It doesn't take Alex Jones-level conspiracies to connect the dots to ESPN's indirect influence over how the Committee operates.

ESPN has exclusive TV rights to the rankings and the CFP games. They also control the TV rights to schools that would be playing in the majority of those games. They have the most influential personalities in the sport on their networks seven days a week.

That's a tic-tac-toe, folks.

Exhibit C: The Collapse of the Pac-12

The Pac-12 died because of years of mismanagement and bad luck, but ESPN was the thing that pushed them off the plank. BYU fans celebrated their demise (rightfully so after the PAC-12 was all snooty-booty towards BYU for decades).

The LA Times wrote about how ESPN’s decision to back out of long-term rights talks left the conference with only a streaming option from Apple. That offer was not enough to keep Oregon and Washington satisfied. USC and UCLA had already left for the Big Ten because they saw the revenue gap (another ESPN indirect influence - had ESPN not previously announced that they wouldld take over SEC rights, the Big Ten might not have been compelled to expand-at-all-costs and maybe never call USC or UCLA at all).

Colorado went back to the Big 12 because it could not afford to wait for the Pac-12 to sort things out. When Oregon and Washington took the Big Ten’s lifeline, the rest of the league collapsed.

The Pac-12 did not need as much money as the Big Ten or the SEC. They just needed a viable long-term TV partner. When ESPN passed, that was it. The longtime conference was dead.

Multiple articles, including a deep dive by the Cal Alumni Association, traced the collapse to the conference’s inability to secure stable Tier 1 rights.

The Big 12 survived, but in the midst of all of these negotiations, they were also upset with ESPN. They sent a cease and desist letter claiming ESPN was encouraging schools to leave. When the new SEC deal was announced in 2020, ESPN took over all SEC football and basketball rights. That deal was enormous, and it widened the financial gulf between the SEC and everyone else. The Pac-12 could not keep up. No one could. The Big Ten played offense, and the rest of the country held on. ESPN pulled the strings.

Exhibit D: Gambling and the Rise of Predictive Truth

The rise of sports gambling is everywhere. ESPN isn't the only outlet pushing the boundaries of what is and is not normal, but they are definitely the largest player in the space.

There are a couple of big problems with this. First, and much larger, is the broader impact on society that sports gambling has. Gambling isn't good (shocker, I know), and it's never been easier to place a bet. Additionally, the integrity of just about every sport has been challenged because of prop bets and rigging outcomes in recent years. That's not solely ESPN's fault, but they're certainly culpable for a lot of things.

The secondary impact is the way that the game is covered and discussed. ESPN has drifted away from football analysis. No longer do you learn how the game works; instead, you learn who the favorites are and what bets make the most sense.

ESPN partnered with Penn and formed ESPNBet. Though the platform failed and Penn pulled the plug, ESPN's coverage remains the same. Every game features point spreads and uses gambling to determine how competitive a game should or should not be.

Spreads became part of the way 'quality teams' are established.

This would not matter if spreads were harmless, but spreads became the lens through which ESPN evaluates team quality. During the 2023 playoff debate, Kirk Herbstreit defended Alabama over undefeated Florida State by leaning heavily on the idea that Alabama would be favored on a neutral field. That is a gambling argument, not a football argument. And yet it shaped the entire selection discourse.

Predictive analytics and power rankings have surged in popularity lately. A lot of those analytics are owned and operated by ESPN, namely FPI.

ESPN’s Football Power Index (FPI) is another tool that ESPN has used to dig its fingers into the body of college football. FPI is predictive, not descriptive. It rewards bluebloods and recruiting giants. It diminishes Cinderella teams and punishes anyone who wins close games. The FPI has become the unofficial analytic system of the sport because ESPN pushes it on every broadcast. It is one of the data points considered by the CFP Committee. Preseason FPI numbers frame discussions before a single snap is played. Fans internalize the projections and assume they are reality.

SP+ is owned by Bill Connelly and has become one of the most accepted advanced analytics powers in the market. But now ESPN employs Connelly and controls how much SP+ is pushed out. You almost never hear about Massey or FEI unless you go search for it directly

Exhibit E: Everything Else ESPN Has Quietly Absorbed

Kickoff times. Which rivalry games get exposure, and when they are played. The way bowl games are deemed prestigious, and which aren't. Agents leak coaching rumors to ESPN journalists, and those narratives spread like wildfire on the network. Hell, even the Heisman Trophy might as well be an ESPN production at this point due to the way the conversation is shaped and how the network broadcasts and profits from the Heisman presentation.

Every frustration fans have about lost rivalries, weird kickoff windows, playoff controversy, or media bias comes back to the fact that ESPN has more control over the sport than any governing body, conference commissioner, or playoff committee.

The Verdict

College football is still the best sport in the world, but it's losing its nostalgia. ESPN, in the name of lining their own pockets, is ruining the sport you love. They are making a big bet that you love college football so much that you won't turn it off, no matter how much they distort and ruin it. As such, the sport is changing, and ESPN is behind all of it.

The network is not killing college football on purpose. They are doing it slowly through a thousand little cuts that serve their business goals. And unless fans recognize what is happening, ESPN will continue to reshape the sport in whatever direction benefits them next.

College football deserves better than this.