Did college football peak in the 1990s? The case for a golden age goes beyond nostalgia

Editor’s note: As the World Cup continues in the United States for the first time since 1994, The Athletic is looking back at college sports in the 1990s and how much has changed since then. Join us for a couple of weeks of offseason football and basketball nostalgia.

For anyone born between 1978 and 1986, it is not hard to identify the moment when college football reached its cultural zenith.

College football peaked in the latter half of the 1990s, the era of puffy Starter jackets, the voice of Keith Jackson bellowing “Whoa, Nellie!” and the dawn of EA Sports’ NCAA Football video game series on PlayStation. This era provided one of the greatest Heisman Trophy races (Charles Woodson over Peyton Manning in 1997), one of the greatest national championship races (undefeated UCLA and undefeated Kansas State losing within hours of each other on Dec. 5, 1998) and several of the greatest individual seasons: Ricky Williams at Texas, Randy Moss at Marshall, Woodson at Michigan.

The case for the 1990s as a golden age of college football is clear to me, an elder millennial. Not everyone sees it the same way. A Reddit thread titled, “What do you consider to be the best era of college football?” produced more than 200 replies but no consensus, with most answers ranging from the 1970s to the 2010s. One poster astutely observed that the responses revealed more about the person answering the question than they revealed about the sport.

“Yeah this is literally just a question of when you were between the ages of 12 and 24,” wrote someone called NazRiedfan.

The Redditor was right: There is no “best” era of college football. The sport began during Reconstruction, boomed in the 1920s and has been a cultural force ever since. Perhaps, in longing for the days of VHS tapes and bean bag chairs, my fellow 40-somethings and I are longing to be 13 again.

By many objective measures, the 1990s were not an exceptional time for college football. Fans who enjoyed parity instead saw a decade dominated by a handful of powerhouse programs: Tom Osborne’s Nebraska dynasty, Bobby Bowden’s Florida State teams, Steve Spurrier’s Fun ‘n’ Gun Florida Gators.

A 2019 ESPN ranking of college football’s greatest games featured only one game from the ’90s in the top 40 — Kordell Stewart’s Hail Mary to give Colorado a last-second win against Michigan in 1994 — compared with nine from the 1980s and five from the 2000s.

Still, I wanted to believe that my fondness for college football in the ’90s involved something more than simple nostalgia. I decided to run this theory past Chuck Klosterman, whose credentials on the topic include a collection of essays called “The Nineties” and another called “Football.”

When I mentioned the premise of the story, Klosterman’s first thought was, “That’s crazy.”  In thinking about it more, he said, he could see a case for the 1990s as the best era to be a consumer of college football, even if the sport itself peaked earlier, perhaps sometime in the 1960s or 1970s.

The argument boils down to this: Football is a sport best watched on television, and the ’90s were the best time to watch college football on TV.

Before the advent of multi-camera TV broadcasts, the nuances of most football plays were invisible to the casual fan. In his book “Football,” Klosterman gives the example of a fan occupying one of the 107,601 seats at Michigan Stadium. That fan might get the best view of one play throughout the game, whereas fans watching on TV get the best view of every play.

“Football is always, always, always better on television than it is in person,” Klosterman writes.

Before the mid-1980s, the NCAA tightly controlled which games could be televised, in part to protect ticket sales. On a given Saturday, the average fan might see one game on TV, likely a regional broadcast on ABC, and maybe one national game, depending on the schedule. That changed with the 1984 NCAA v. Board of Regents of the University of Oklahoma Supreme Court decision, which opened the door for conferences to control their TV rights.

This era marked the beginning of college football Saturdays as we know them today: an all-day, cross-country journey enjoyed from the comfort of the couch. Fans weren’t just seeing their local team and the big national games. They were seeing college football in all its glorious weirdness, including smaller conferences.

“That was an incredible time to watch college football,” Klosterman said. “It was almost like you were seeing things that in the past you’d only read about. You were seeing games, you were seeing stadiums and you were seeing these things that, in the past, had almost been an extension of print media.”

The Supreme Court decision empowered the College Football Association, a consortium of schools from the SEC, ACC, Big Eight, and Southwest Conference, plus Notre Dame, to band together to sell their TV rights. The CFA found a willing partner in ESPN, the fledgling cable network that launched in 1979.

ESPN paid $9.3 million to broadcast its first slate of CFA games in 1984. After several years of airing games only in delay, ESPN aired college football live for the first time. The arrival of college football coincided with a period of rapid growth for ESPN, which went from 35 million homes in 1984 to 77 million by the end of the 1990s.

The ’90s brought several innovations that changed the way fans watched college football, including Thursday night games and ESPN’s “Bowl Week.” Both were spearheaded by Mike Aresco, the former commissioner of the Big East and American conferences who oversaw college sports programming at ESPN and later at CBS.

“College football rode the growth of cable, for sure,” Aresco said. “Bowl season became a huge deal. Whether people felt they mattered or not, people loved to watch the games.”

In 1993, ESPN launched a spin-off channel, ESPN2, to air more live sports. The new channel targeted a younger male audience with graffiti-splashed graphics and anchors wearing leather jackets. One of its first segments featured actor Billy Crystal sitting in the desert, watching New York Mets games via a satellite dish while filming the movie “City Slickers.”

“The advertising agencies are saying, ‘Give us an alternative to MTV,’ so ESPN2, when it launched, was a little funky,” said Tom Odjakjian, who was director of college sports at ESPN and ESPN2 when the new channel launched.

Odjakjian, a graduate of Lafayette College, had a hand in picking the first college football game to air on ESPN2: the annual showdown between Lafayette and Lehigh, the most-played rivalry in college football.

Money was tight, so ESPN2 used a local TV station’s production of the game and sent its own announcers as a test run for its first batch of bowl games later that year.

“Now they’re very conscious of the on-screen graphics and branding and things like that, but back in the early days, sometimes we just couldn’t worry about all that,” said Odjakjian, who left ESPN in 1994 and worked as an associate commissioner for the Big East and the American before his retirement in 2022.

Over time, the graphics improved and the games grew bigger. The CFA disbanded in 1997, leaving each conference in charge of its TV rights. The Bowl Championship Series arrived the following year, providing college football with a mechanism to set a No. 1-versus-No. 2 national championship game.

When CBS negotiated a deal to broadcast SEC games to a national audience, some in the industry doubted that affiliates outside the Southeast would want to carry them. Aresco, who by then had moved from ESPN to CBS, could see that college football’s regional distinctions were fading. Even if they didn’t live in the South or root for a team from the SEC, fans had a reason to care about the big SEC games that shaped the BCS race.

“Privately, a lot of consultants criticized it,” Aresco said of the CBS deal with the SEC. “They didn’t say we were crazy, but they thought we were misguided. My position was, ‘What are they going to do, carry old movies or infomercials?’”

In the span of a few decades, college football’s tightly restricted TV schedule gave way to a full slate of games on ESPN, ABC, CBS, ESPN2, Fox Sports Net and other channels. Fans got to see the great players and great teams of the 1990s in a way they hadn’t seen players and teams from other eras.

Today, watching a full weekend of college football means juggling multiple log-ins, devices and streaming services. And when fans are watching, they’re not just watching — they’re also scrolling, texting, shopping, placing bets on their phones or otherwise dividing their attention. Longing for college football in the ’90s is, in part, a longing for a time when TV restrictions were lifted but before the internet displaced cable TV as a cultural force.

“The ’90s is kind of that sweet spot in between,” said Christian Anderson, a professor of higher education at South Carolina who edited a book, “The History of American College Football.” “There’s something of a common language, just like with late-night TV. In the ’90s, there was ‘The Tonight Show’ and ‘The Late Show.’ On Thursday night, you’d watch ‘Seinfeld.’ Everyone had this common experience.”

Those common experiences still exist. Indiana’s victory against Miami in the College Football Playoff championship game averaged more than 30 million viewers, making it the most-watched non-NFL sporting event in nearly a decade. Though fans are still watching college football in huge numbers, many say the sport’s upheaval has made it less enjoyable.

For most of its history, college football was a regional sport with a collection of arcane rules, traditions and rivalries that weren’t supposed to make sense to everyone. In the 1990s, cable TV brought that regional sport to a national audience. By watching college football, fans also changed it. Everything that followed — the big money, the chaos of conference realignment, the demise of rivalries, games kicking off at all hours of the day and night — happened because people loved watching college football on TV.

“In the ’90s, there was still some connection to the deep past that is harder to do now,” Klosterman said. “These programs were still connected to, like, the programs of legend and lore. Maybe what we’re talking about when we’re saying the ’90s were so great is maybe that was the end of it.”

Thinking about it that way made it easier for me to see what my fellow millennials and I miss about college football in the 1990s. It wasn’t just the experience of being a kid, at least not entirely. It was the experience of being a kid at a perfect moment in college football’s TV revolution.

A time after the cameras came on but before anyone knew what it meant.