I was once told that I was in an abusive relationship with the Notre Dame Fighting Irish football team. It is true that they have rarely made me happy. More common emotions I feel on fall Saturdays are relief (after wins) and anger and despair (after losses). I do not expect the Irish to make me happy anymore. But even if they did, even if they brought the national championship back to South Bend, however much lasting joy it would bring me—there would still be next season, and more seasons after that, to worry about and then, inevitably, despair over. So why do I stick around, why do I I choose to get mad at a television screen for three hours instead of doing literally anything else with my limited time in this world? It’s a hard question to answer.

I suspect many other fans of college football are asking themselves similar questions. The nature of fandom isn’t changing—we all understand what we have signed up for—but college football is. Every sports fan understands the pain of being let down by the team, but to be let down, almost all at the same time, by every institution with a role in governing, promoting and preserving the sport is a rarer experience. The regional conference identities that defined football for so long are being steadily broken apart by TV networks, who want to show games that will get higher ratings, and the schools themselves, who want bigger rights fees from the networks. The Big Ten, the premier Midwestern conference so named because for the better part of a century it had ten teams, now has eighteen. They include such Midwestern schools as UCLA and Rutgers. The Pac-12, which was the top conference on the West Coast, has been abandoned by ten of its twelve members. Its biggest brands were taken by the Big Ten; the rest found what conference alignment (and TV money) they could, and so Cal and Stanford now belong to the Atlantic Coast Conference. The playoff at the highest level of the sport, which has only been around for about a decade, expanded last season from four teams to twelve.

The players are changing, too. They are no longer unpaid amateurs. National Collegiate Athletic Association v. Alston, which the Supreme Court handed down in 2021, declared that long-standing NCAA restrictions on education-related benefits were violations of antitrust law. As a result, athletes are allowed to profit off their name, image and likeness. Almost immediately, booster collectives sprung up all over the country to give players previously unthinkable sums of money in exchange for things like autograph signings and appearances in advertisements. And they have to pay up if they want to keep their talent; among the NCAA rules the courts have declared violations of antitrust law are the old restrictions on transferring, which kept most players at the school they signed with out of high school. Players now can transfer as many times as they want without losing their eligibility. And the last line of amateurism—the schools directly paying the players—has fallen with the settlement of House v. NCAA.

So college football is, in effect, now a business with employees. Most things, especially most things that make as much money as college football does, are. It’s very American. But when fall Saturdays come around, we still like to pretend it’s about something else.