Was lurking a bit at the old place, and there was a thread asking who had never bet on CFB*, but the discussion went more into how legalized sports betting has affected fans’ engagement with college football. I am in a weird place, as I can’t come up with a lot of good reasons to specifically ban it when so many other forms of gambling are legal. It can also of course be done to a healthy degree, and even if someone is enthusiastic and engages with the sport in a gambling-centered way, who am I to say that’s “wrong”?
That said, I do fucking hate it at a personal level when people care more about the lines and the spreads or how their fantasy roster is doing in contrast to the rivalries and the stories and the analysis as a competition. I feel like these people, and particularly the media catering to them, are nudging team sports closer to the liminal space currently occupied by boxing and horse racing, where there is a hardcore base dedicated to the sports themselves, but the broad appeal is for gamblers and the occasional looky-loo spectacle. I can’t argue for any particular measure to stop it, but I sure don’t have to like it.
So, for those of us still hanging around in the very stupid offseason we now have with no real transfer restrictions and plenty of NIL to push players to leverage that fact, how has the explosion of sports betting affected your relationship with CFB?
(* - One $10 bet, well before 2022, on TCU to win the natty while in Vegas for other reasons, and one very boring season of buy-in fantasy football, though now that I type it, I guess that was betting on the NFL)
My engagement with CFB has gone down since the advent of widespread legal sports gambling, but not because of it.
My interest has declined because I’m burned out on the sport. When I was still on spezdit, cfb was one of the communities I spent the most time in. I’m just honestly tired of reading teenagers and middle aged people talk about entire conferences as if they are all collectively the second coming of Christ. I don’t miss having satellite and flipping past the four letter network and hearing them talk about the latest trendy flashy cfb team like they’re middle school boys discussing the virtues of Taylor Swift and onanism.
I used to enjoy few things as much as I enjoyed a Saturday spent on the couch watching as many cfb games as possible. Now, that honestly sounds boring. I’d rather do laundry, read fanfiction, listen to a baseball game, walk in a park, or many other things.
Are you… okay? 🤣
More seriously, I can see that. The causes are more internal to the sport than yours, but I feel like my interest is more brittle than in years past and it won’t take much more to bump it lower. Not sure what that will look like in the fall though, especially if either of my teams starts well.
Am I okay?
In all honesty I may be clinically depressed. It’s something I’ve dealt with for much of my life.
Oversharing aside, I also don’t spend a heck of a lot of time at home, so I get antzy when I feel like my chances of keeping up with laundry needs are slipping.
Also, on the lack of cfb interest in particular, I went to a D3 school that didn’t have a football team while I was there. So it’s not a core part of my memory/identity like it might have been if I had instead gone to UT, Bama, Ohio State, or USC.
Fair enough, and best wishes to you. Take care of yourself.
Back to football, some of the biggest Georgia fans I know went to D3 schools for undergrad. No zealot like the convert, I suppose. I was myself a stranger in a strange land, bubbling up from the swamps of Florida to sojourn for a time among the child-barkers. Then I married a Horned Frog. This has been a particularly annoying era, LOL.