re: Is College football broken?

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I live in PA and grew up in GA, the die hard fandom for PA college football teams (PITT, PSU) is nowhere near what UGA has in Georgia. PA also isn't close to the talent level that Georgia is as a state. HS football here is not on the same level as Georgia HS.

Ohio is different tho, that state worships OSU very similar to how GA loves UGA.

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I live in western PA and I can attest to this. Allegheny County which is Pittsburgh and suburbs has gone from 1.6 million people in 1970 down to 1.25 million in 2020. That is just one county, if you tack on other old mill towns and counties around the western part of the state, you're looking at even more population loss. Western PA used to be what GA is now when it comes to HS football, but with population decline it has slacked off. A lot of powerful football schools are now in the central and eastern half of the state.

Pitt has a small niche fan base in the city, but even in 2021, their best season in 40 years attendance was abysmal. PSU is popular and the people who go to the games are in diehard but the coverage isn't overwhelming here the way it is in the SEC states with their programs.

Most of the northeast is checked out on college football. Only 5 power conference teams (Pitt,PSU, Rutgers, Syracuse, and BC), and most are mid to lower tier programs.

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playoff or bust mentality.

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IMO, this was kind of inevitable as technology advanced and people started working farther away from home. This is just a theory I have:

In the old days, an Ohio State grad would walk through his office in Chicago and interact with alumni from places like Michigan, Wisconsin, Iowa, Michigan State, etc. To these people, winning the Big 10 and going to the Rose Bowl was everything.

Now, that same OSU grad walking through his office in Chicago is just as likely to run into alumni from places like Georgia, Alabama, Texas, Florida State, etc. Naturally, these fans don't care who wins the Big 10 and Rose Bowl, but they do want to have talking points and ways to compare their teams.

I have thought for a long time that fans/alumni of different schools mingling together like this more than they did in the past was a huge driver behind a lot of the changes in college football.

How did conference championships become devalued? Because when that Clemson fan walks into his office bragging about his team's ACC championship, he gets mocked by fans of schools outside of his own region for only winning the ACC and not doing more.