Anyone have any thoughts on the future of collegiate sports. If lots here think football dies, does that include CFB or just pro football?
College sports in general are at a strange place right now. More and more revenue is being generated, but it is mostly coming from football and basketball with the majority of the revenue coming from the power schools/ conferences of those respective sports. With the idealism of amateurism being called into question, college sports are quite fickle at this point in time. Lets look at how I think things will end up in the major sports:
College Football: Since everything is currently controlled by the major conferences instead of the NCAA, If a college isn't affiliated with one of the SEC, Big Ten, ACC, Pac 12, Big XII they are in a much worse competitive and financial place. A few years back the major conferences started raiding the smaller conferences of schools in key markets (ex. Rutgers for the New York City/ New Jersey market), resulting in the football death of the Big East and to some extent the WAC. I could see this trend continuing every few years until we are left with 3 or 4 major conferences with upwards of 24 teams each. If youth participation in football begins to fall, and the tv money dries up, then its possible the smaller schools begin to abandon their football programs as it starts to lose major money for their university. College football may be a microcosm of the North American free trade system's affect on businesses based on their size and marketing potential.
College Basketball: The Men's NCAA Basketball tournament will continue to bring in very large television money to the schools for many years to come. The conferences will obviously be affected by realignment because of football, but the smaller conferences will still be able to be competitive with the larger schools due to factors such as one and done players at institutions such as Kentucky and Duke, as well as increased parity due to the rise of AAV basketball during the summer for high school players. Basketball should be fine for a very long time.
College Hockey: A niche sport that is really big a a few universities (North Dakota, Minnesota, Boston College, Denver, etc.), but overall irrelevant for most of the year until it gets some media attention during the Frozen Four. It has the potential to expand to a few more major universities (ex. the Big Ten schools without programs, Washington, Oregon, maybe some ACC schools), but overall won't be affected by much over the next few years.
College Baseball: I don't know a lot about college baseball, but I assume it is slotted somewhere between basketball and hockey in popularity. Probably makes a good slice of revenue from the college world series. I don't know enough about it to speculate on it's future.
Other college sports: Soccer, lacrosse, rugby, swimming, diving, rowing, track and field etc. probably have some programs which are popular, but overall most likely bleed money and are greatly subsidized by the football and basketball programs at most schools. The problem is without these sports where would these athletes train? Also with Title IX I couldn't see any universities getting rid of most of these sports to save money.
Amateurism: To me the biggest factor for the future of college sports is if these sports are continued to be considered amateur competitions. If football and basketball players end up getting paid as compensation for their services on the court/ field it could have several impacts on the college sports landscape. First it would mean that athletes competing in other sports that don't make a profit for the university will want compensation as well. Second the smaller universities probably can't afford to pay 53 football players (possibly plus practice roster), so they may decide to drop college football altogether (basketball with less scholarships would probably be okay). Third the players on the football/ basketball teams can finally use their personal likeness for profit, so the university can sell jerseys and t-shirts with the players names on it, giving the players a cut of the revenue. Overall I think the larger schools such as Texas, USC, Florida, Stanford, Alabama, Ohio State, North Carolina, etc. would be able to afford paying for professional players, while the FCS schools, and other 5 conference schools would be in trouble when it comes to university athletics.