College football on television includes the broad- and cablecasting of college football games, as well as pre- and post-game reports, analysis, and human-interest stories. Within the United States, the college version of American football annually garners high television ratings.
College football games have been broadcast since 1939, beginning with the 1939 Waynesburg vs. Fordham football game on September 30 in New York City. The introduction of sports-specific television networks has increased the amount of air-time available for coverage. Today, dozens of games are available for viewing each week of the football season. Other coverage includes local broadcasts of weekly coach's programs. These programs have become an important sources of revenue for the universities and their athletics programs.
Televising the games allows alumni to follow their alma mater's team, as well as competing schools and top-ranked schools nationally. Not all games are televised. Coverage is dependent on negotiations between the broadcaster and the college football conference or team. In general, major programs will be televised more often than smaller programs. The televised games may change from year-to-year depending on which teams are having a strong season, although some traditional rivalry games are broadcast each year. Major match-ups between top-ranked teams or major rivals are often broadcast nationally. Some games are traditionally associated with a specific event or holiday, and viewing the game itself can become a holiday tradition for fans. Post-season bowl games, including the Bowl Championship Series, are presently all televised, most of them by the ESPN networks.
Rarely, the NCAA will assert a "television ban" on schools which have incurred serious rules violations and sanctions, which does not allow a team to have their games carried on television for a certain number of years, effectively reducing a team's fanbase on gamedays solely to those in the stadium and listening to the team's radio broadcast, which are usually only distributed in the team's state or region. Because the effect of a television ban can equal that of the "death penalty", this sanction is rarely applied except for the most egregious of circumstances, such as the Southern Methodist University football scandal and the one year ban which applied to the 1993 Auburn Tigers.
Read more about College Football On Television: The Modern Era
Famous quotes containing the words college, football and/or television:
“I never feel so conscious of my race as I do when I stand before a class of twenty-five young men and women eager to learn about what it is to be black in America.”
—Claire Oberon Garcia, African American college professor. As quoted in the Chronicle of Higher Education, p. B3 (July 27, 1994)
“In this dream that dogs me I am part
Of a silent crowd walking under a wall,
Leaving a football match, perhaps, or a pit,
All moving the same way.”
—Philip Larkin (1922–1986)
“What is a television apparatus to man, who has only to shut his eyes to see the most inaccessible regions of the seen and the never seen, who has only to imagine in order to pierce through walls and cause all the planetary Baghdads of his dreams to rise from the dust.”
—Salvador Dali (1904–1989)