Three Thoughts From The Weekend: The college football experience and more

As Purdue keeps chugging along with its renovation of Ross-Ade Stadium, a project that a pandemic could only slightly delay, as it turned out, it reminds of the strange dynamic at play with such things nowadays.

As you know, UCLA and USC are joining the Big Ten, assuming the state of California can't stand in UCLA's way. They're doing so 100-percent because of money, money derived from television.

Meanwhile, there will never be a day in which college A.D.s and presidents and whoever else it may be don't value the college football game day, the in-person college football experience and that sweet, sweet gate revenue and ancillary cashflow.

When they're upgrading their facilities, they're doing so for utility, yes, but also to enhance the fan experience.

The bottom line is that these cash-cow football programs are swimming in TV money, but also required to do everything in their power to try to get people to turn said TVs off and come to the games.

College football isn't near what it is today without the people, without the friends who connect over football Saturday, who eat sausage and drink beer out of the back of an SUV. The people who bring their kids to watch the marching band, kids who may well grow up to do the same with their own kids.

The sport needs those people. They are college football as much as anything. And as the TV product gets better and better, our couches get comfier and comfier and gas gets more and more expensive, there's a bit of a conflict at work here.

College football is beholden to TV, to give TV whatever it wants and make the TV product as valuable as can be. Lord knows they're paying for it.

Television will always be the priority.

But these schools and programs also very much involved in this sort of quiet, understated competition with the very sugar daddy that makes it all possible.