The popularity of college athletics

The popularity of college sports are kind of strange if you think about it (actually the following of sports period is strange but that’s something for another article). Essentially you have thousands of fans (I’m talking mostly college football and basketball but there are other sports with decent following as well) following a group of amateurs, a lot of which never actually attended the school that they are cheering for. But, for whatever reason college sports are intensely popular and in the case of college football it may be the most popular sport in the country. I, myself, despite all of my NFL postings on here actually love the college game more and the question is why?

There are plenty of reasons why college sports are so beloved but I am going to focus on three different things. Recognition for your area/school on a national landscape, upsets (or at least the hope for one) and the lack of players getting paid.

One of the biggest reasons I think college sports are so popular is because it gives your small town your small state a chance to be on national TV. Think about Northern Iowa last year in the NCAA tournament upsetting Kansas. Before this game most people out side of the state of Iowa probably had not heard of Cedar Falls, Iowa (hell, there are lots of people from outside of the state who haven’t even heard of Iowa.) For a day (or a couple of days) Northern Iowa was all over ESPN, Sports Illustrated and whatever sports publication you can think of. The alumni and current students of that school could look at the home page for these websites and see there schools name. When they wore their purple and yellow shirts in different cities throughout the country people could look at them and their shirts and say “hey, I know who that is.”.

Even the bigger schools get to experience this same kind of thing. As an Iowan, my city will never have a major pro sports team so when a team like the Cubs or Bulls do something, while it’s cool that they won because I am a huge fan of that team, it’s just not the same as when the Hawkeyes win. I have no personal connection to the Cubs aside from the fact that I like them and want them to win but when it comes to Iowa, I went to school there, I grew up in this state as did may parents. I can say to everyone that I am a Hawkeye and it isn’t weird, unlike if I said that I am a Cub or a Bull or something like that.

Another reason that I see college sports as being more popular are the mis-matches. And, while I know this sounds weird, because it kind of goes against conventional thinking, but when you think about it some of the more popular events in sports history are when upsets occur. For instance Boise beating Oklahoma was considered one of the best college football games of all time. Sure, part of it was that it was a great game but some of it had to do with David vs Goliath. Also, look at the popularity of the NCAA basketball tournament. The first week of the tournament may be the best week in sports and a lot of it because the tournament is so unpredictable and you have no idea who is going to come out on top.

I last thing that boosts the popularity, which I don’t completely think is anything too special, would be the fact that college athletes don’t get paid. Well they don’t get paid with a salary at least. The reason that I take issue with this reasoning a little bit is because it assumes that college players don’t have much to gain from playing the sport except for the love of the game. This has some flaws. A lot of players get to play for free. They also play with the hope of playing professionally and making millions so it’s not as if they get nothing. Plus if people enjoyed watching college sports solely for the purity of it you would think lower divisions would be more popular as that is more of an accurate statement, especially at schools where they don’t give scholarships and playing an organized sport is pretty much an extracurricular activity that takes up a lot of time.

On the other hand I do enjoy watching a walk on get onto the field/court. In a lot of cases those players are players who have dreamed of playing for that school and it’s neat to get to see that kid live his dream.

Now I understand that there are way more reasons to be into college athletics but I mainly picked three because I didn’t want to write that much :).