College Football On Television

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.