Who killed college football? New project explores other side to sport’s explosive growth

The eyes of the college football world will once again fall upon the state of Alabama on Saturday night.

A visit from second-ranked Georgia to Tuscaloosa will have Bryant-Denny Stadium will be a celebration of where the sport sits in 2024.

You won’t, however, find Steven Godfrey or Ryan Nanni in party hats doing a champagne toast on the Quad.

The minds behind the new podcast “Who Killed College Football” will tell you how we got to this point in the sport’s timeline. The first episode drops Thursday in a series that will explore the different institutions that shaped college football into the product you find in 2024.

From the conferences, the agents, the villainous NCAA, to the federal government, these veteran voices with years covering college football offer an unvarnished view of how we got here and where we’re headed.

The first episode focuses on the television networks and how they’ve shaped the sport into a 10-figure behemoth. The 6:30 p.m. CT Alabama-Georgia broadcast on ABC, for example, is part of ESPN’s new multi-billion dollar contract with the SEC. That deal snatched the league’s biggest weekly game from CBS’s clutches and consolidated the SEC’s full inventory of football games under the same corporate family of networks.

ESPN’s College GameDay — a branch of that publicly traded tree — will broadcast live from campus earlier in the day as the big business of the sport will be on full display.

The first episode of “Who Killed College Football” takes listeners back all the way to the humble beginnings of television, getting a first taste, followed by the legal maneuvers and transactions that essentially gave them ownership.

Pockets were filled but at what cost?

That’s the gist of Episode 1 which takes listeners through the fun of the Sherman Antitrust Act, the College Football Association (CFA) and how the major conferences played their roles.

Nanni, a Florida grad with an NYU law degree, explains the nerdy details in a way football fans can digest.

And Ole Miss grad Godfrey brings the especially unbuffed honesty listeners of his other podcast, Split Zone Duo, would come to expect. A veteran reporter with an investigative bend, Godfrey’s also a columnist whose work appears in The Washington Post after spending years as a national college football writer at SB Nation.

For fans of Nanni, this is a more serious journalism project than his role on another audio medium. Listeners of the Shutdown Fullcast will get a more buttoned-up version of the man who once cosplayed as a Bloomin’ Onion at the Outback Bowl, but don’t mistake this podcast for school.

Combined, the two offer an unfiltered and uncompromised view of how college football got to this place of fractured conferences, regionality’s loosening grip on the sport and who is to blame for it all.

You’ll learn a lot, but the tie is loosened just enough not to drive away the casuals.

New episodes will be released bi-weekly and can be found on all major podcast platforms.

Michael Casagrande is a reporter for the Alabama Media Group. Follow him on Twitter @ByCasagrande or on Facebook