There was a time when waking up on Saturday morning, turning on ESPN and hearing the College GameDay theme meant one thing: college football was here.

Not SEC football.

Not Big Ten football.

Not whichever schools happened to have the largest television contracts.

College football.

Somewhere along the way, ESPN seems to have misplaced that memo.

Through the first four full weeks of the 2026 season, College GameDay will have made four trips. Baton Rouge. Austin. Oxford. Knoxville.

What do those four places have in common? Yep. Every single one is an SEC campus.

Week 1 was Clemson at LSU. Week 2 was Ohio State at Texas. Week 3 was LSU at Ole Miss. And ESPN announced Sunday that Week 4 will feature Texas at Tennessee in Knoxville.

At this point they may as well replace the Home Depot signs with SEC logos, have Greg Sankey do the opening monologue and call the thing SEC GameDay presented by ESPN, presented by the SEC, presented by ESPN presenting the SEC.

And apparently we're not the only ones noticing.

Social media erupted again after the Tennessee announcement, with fans asking a pretty reasonable question: Does College GameDay still cover college football, or is it now essentially a three-hour commercial for the portion of college football ESPN has the most money invested in?

That's particularly irritating because one of the things that once made GameDay special was exactly the opposite.

Washington State.

App State.

James Madison.

Cincinnati.

Memphis.

Boise State.

Those were the Saturdays that felt different. You got to see traditions you hadn't seen 47 times before. You learned about a town, a fan base and a program that didn't get six hours of national television coverage every week.

It made the sport feel big.

Now we apparently need our fourth consecutive tour of the SEC footprint.

BUT SURELY THIS IS ABOUT RATINGS, RIGHT?

That's the obvious defense.

ESPN is a television company. Television companies like viewers. Alabama, LSU, Texas, Tennessee and Georgia have enormous fan bases.

Fair enough.

Except there's one inconvenient little problem with the theory that people won't watch College GameDay when it goes to one of those scary little schools outside the country club.

They do.

When GameDay went to Appalachian State in 2022, the show averaged 2.2 million viewers and peaked at 2.8 million during the final hour. ESPN's average for the entire 2022 season?

About 2.1 million.

In other words, little ol' App State didn't drag the ratings down.

It beat the season average.

Then there's James Madison.

GameDay's 2023 trip to Harrisonburg drew an average of 2.2 million viewers during the three-hour show while a reported 26,000 people packed the site. ESPN's average for the entire 2023 GameDay season was about 2.0 million viewers.

Again: above average.

Cincinnati's first GameDay appearance in 2021 drew 1.826 million viewers, led every Saturday morning college football pregame show and was 8% higher than ESPN's comparable Week 10 audience in 2019. The final hour drew nearly 2.4 million.

And ESPN itself bragged about this phenomenon after the 2022 season. App State, Montana State and Kansas all topped 2.1 million viewers during their first GameDay appearances. Even Jackson State (an FCS program) drew 1.8 million.

Funny how that works.

It's almost as if college football fans enjoy seeing college football.

MAYBE STOP MAKING THE G6 THE PUNCHLINE

That makes ESPN's occasional lame-ass jokes about the Group of Six even more aggravating.

During the season-opening show at LSU, GameDay discussed Northern Illinois moving to the Mountain West and essentially turned the LSU crowd's lack of knowledge about the move into a punchline. G6 fans understandably weren't thrilled, with some pointing out the absurdity of a show supposedly dedicated to college football mocking fans of dozens of programs for caring about…college football.

That's the problem.

ESPN can't spend years giving G6 programs less exposure, spend Saturday mornings telling viewers that only about 15 schools truly matter, turn the smaller programs into comedy material and then point to a lack of national interest as justification for giving them even less exposure.

That's a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Imagine running a restaurant, hiding half the menu, making jokes about anyone who orders from it and then announcing six months later that those items clearly weren't popular.

Brilliant research.

FOLLOW THE MONEY

None of this requires some grand conspiracy theory.

Just follow the money.

ESPN and the SEC began a massive 10-year rights agreement in 2024 that put SEC-controlled football under the ESPN/ABC umbrella and dramatically expanded the network's ability to showcase the conference. ESPN's own announcement described the arrangement as providing the SEC with “maximum exposure.”

Meanwhile, ESPN also owns the exclusive worldwide television rights to the College Football Playoff through the 2031-32 season. Beginning with the current rights cycle, that agreement is worth billions of dollars.

Does that mean there's a memo somewhere saying, “College GameDay must visit SEC campuses”?

No.

But come on.

When you've invested enormous amounts of money in a product, you're probably not going to spend Saturday mornings explaining why the products across the street are just as interesting.

And that gets us to the much larger problem with modern college athletics.

Television money hasn't simply changed what games we watch. It has helped change what the sport actually looks like.

The pursuit of media-rights money was a major factor in the realignment wave that destroyed the old Pac-12 structure, separated longtime rivals and helped create conferences where schools on opposite sides of the country somehow became neighbors.

ESPN didn't do that alone. Fox, CBS, NBC, conference commissioners, university presidents and athletic directors all have fingerprints on this thing.

But pretending ESPN isn't one of the most powerful forces in college athletics would be ridiculous.

When the same company owns major conference inventory, controls huge chunks of the weekly national conversation and owns the exclusive rights to the championship tournament at the end of the season, its decisions about who gets attention matter.

Exposure creates relevance. Relevance creates recruits, donations, television audiences and money.

And money creates more exposure.

Round and round we go.

Guess who's usually standing outside the circle?

AND THE SHOW ITSELF ISN'T EXACTLY HELPING

There's another uncomfortable truth here.

College GameDay isn't nearly as easy to sit through as it used to be.

Three hours is a lot.

Especially when portions of the show increasingly feel like the same Saturday copied and pasted from the week before.

Playoff debate.

SEC debate.

A couple of emotional features.

Pat McAfee yelling.

Somebody says something edgy. Everybody laughs. Kicking contest. More playoff discussion. Another conversation about one of the same twelve schools. Guest picker. See you next week.

You almost need to earn a commemorative T-shirt for making it from the opening shot to the final pick without grabbing the remote.

The irony is that visiting someplace like Lafayette, Boone, Harrisonburg, Memphis, Boise or any number of other campuses would actually help solve that problem.

Give us something different.

Show us the tailgate traditions nobody outside the region knows about.

Talk to fans who might never get GameDay again.

Tell us why a rivalry matters in that town.

Introduce America to players who aren't already appearing in six commercials during every broadcast.

Remember when discovering those things was part of the appeal?

COLLEGE FOOTBALL IS BIGGER THAN 15 SCHOOLS

Here's the part ESPN and the power brokers of the sport continue to misunderstand.

Louisiana fans know Louisiana isn't operating with Texas' budget.

App State fans know they aren't Ohio State.

James Madison isn't pretending to be Alabama.

Nobody is asking you to pretend otherwise.

We're asking you to acknowledge that the reason college football became special in the first place was because it wasn't the NFL.

It was weird.

Regional.

Chaotic.

Boise played on blue turf. Louisiana tailgates smelled like somebody's uncle started cooking at 4:30 in the morning. Washington State fans carried a damn flag to GameDay every week whether the show wanted to come to Pullman or not.

Those differences were the product. And ESPN used to understand that. Even stranger, the television numbers suggest fans still do.

App State drew 2.2 million.

James Madison drew 2.2 million.

Cincinnati won its Saturday morning time slot.

The smaller-school GameDays haven't been charity projects.

People watched.

So maybe instead of making another lame joke about the G6, spending another Saturday explaining why the same group of programs matters more than everybody else and sending the buses to another SEC campus, ESPN could remember the name written across the desk.

It's College GameDay.

Not Power Conference GameDay.

Not SEC GameDay.

College GameDay.

There are roughly 130 other schools out there with stories worth telling.

Take the bus somewhere different every once in a while.

You might even get good ratings.