College football is chaotic, messy — and more popular than ever

For a few years now, Fox executive Mike Mulvihill has watched the discourse unspool among college football fans. In the throes of seismic changes — think NIL deals, the transfer portal and coaches ditching their teams in the middle of the College Football Playoff — the sport, fans complain, is in shambles.

Nothing, Mulvihill said, could be further than the truth.

“The most overused word in college sports is ‘chaos,’” Mulvihill, president of insights and analytics at Fox, said in an interview. “You hear ‘chaos’ all the time. College sports is changing, but not all change is chaos. College football has never been more popular.”

The proof, Mulvihill said, is best seen in a single number: TV viewers consumed 179 billion minutes of college football this past regular season. Over the last five years that number has risen dramatically, up 33% from 135 billion minutes in 2021.

Before unpacking what that number means, it’s worth cataloging some of those vast and varied complaints.

Consider just the past few months. When James Madison and Tulane made the College Football Playoff this season, coach-turned-ESPN-analyst Nick Saban compared it to letting a Triple-A team into baseball’s playoffs.

Yahoo columnist Dan Wolken suggested the great problem of college football was coach Lane Kiffin’s defection from Mississippi to LSU, worrying “it wrecked the legitimacy of the sport.”

Bruce Feldman of the Athletic excoriated ESPN’s weekly playoff rankings in December, writing on X: “It’s like the CFP committee is going out of its way to show that the sport is run by morons.”

Politicians, most notably Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry (R), have railed against the hundreds of millions of dollars teams are paying coaches after they’ve fired them.

Saban and Kirk Herbstreit, ESPN’s top college football analyst, have repeatedly pointed to the lack of structure around NIL deals and the transfer portal as the culprit for what they see as college football’s demise.

Missouri Coach Eli Drinkwitz perhaps summed it up best: “College football is sick,” he said this season.

Nick Dawson, a senior vice president of college sports programming and acquisitions at ESPN, has fielded complaints from his own staff. Not long ago, Herbstreit asked him why ESPN still sponsored so many bowl games as teams with losing records were getting invited to games.

“Knowing his background and how he grew up and he played in the whole deal it’s fair to ask, like, ‘Is that the right thing to be doing as a sport?’” Dawson said. “We put these games on, people seem to want to watch them, right? If there’s demand for the product, there’s a willingness for the participants to participate in the product, it seems like a healthy thing.”

This season’s bowl games on ESPN recorded their highest audience in 10 years. Other metrics paint a similar picture. Thanks to the expanded playoff, college football accounted for eight of the 100 most-watched TV telecasts in 2025, its most ever. ESPN posted its most-viewed college football season since 2011. The network’s senior vice president of research, Flora Kelly, noted that fans under 18 and women showed the largest audience growth.

There are a few explanations, TV executives noted. The first is the parity of the NIL era. Kelly said that Oklahoma’s TV audience grew substantially this season as the Sooners made the playoff after going 6-7 in 2024. But because there was more parity across the SEC, she said, there was more interest and more close games, which increased viewership.

The networks have also gotten better at scheduling. The ever-expanding Big Ten and SEC have made for more nationally appealing games between schools with bigger brands, and the networks have taken advantage. Fox introduced a weekly 11 a.m. Central showcase game in 2019 (though that, naturally, has brought its own complaints). And ESPN has set up three back-to-back SEC windows across fall Saturdays and put more games on ABC, which, as a broadcast network, reaches more people.

Overall, there are far more games on TV. There were 387 national telecasts in the 2021 regular season, compared with 487 in 2025. That has certainly meant more overall minutes consumed, though per game viewers are also up.

Nielsen also changed the way it tabulates viewers this season, counting more devices and people watching outside their homes, such as at a bar, in smaller markets, especially in Big 12 and SEC country. Previously, Nielsen calculated out-of-home viewing mostly in larger markets. The new system has led to increases in TV viewership in all sports but has had perhaps the biggest impact on college football, because out-of-home viewing is now being calculated in places like Birmingham and Oklahoma City.

In some ways, then, the ratings are simply catching up to the sport’s popularity — with even more ground to cover. Front Office reported this week that ESPN wants more college football talk on its airwaves, to match the sport’s growing reach.

There is a delicate balance, though, noted Will Leitch, who writes a college football column for the Athletic (and also contributes to The Washington Post). And it’s not about paying players or the transfer portal.

“The worry is as the SEC and Big Ten become more and more powerful and consolidate more and more power, the sport starts to float toward the NFL,” he said. “If they pick off a Florida State or a Clemson, then you start to lose more and more of what people do like about college football. Not just rivalries but familiarity. But as long as it still feels like college football I think people will still go with it.”

He added, “College football is really entering its baseball phase, where people feel like it’s in trouble because it’s so different than when people fell in love with it.”