College football's viewership imbalance

This graphic has been making the rounds on X (I will never stop calling it Twitter) over the past couple of weeks, and it is equal parts fascinating and concerning:

Over the past eight college football seasons, fully half of the sport's television viewership has been generated by just 18 teams. And all of those teams, with the exception of Clemson, Notre Dame and Florida State, either are, or as of this fall will be, members of the SEC or Big 10.

There's probably a feedback loop here. Networks figure that college football fans want to see these teams, so they are on TV more often, which means that more people end up watching them, even if only casually. These ratings also include College Football Playoff games as well as regular season and other bowl games, which gives an additional ratings boost to multi-year CFP participants like Alabama, Clemson, Georgia and Ohio State. But the resulting concentration of viewership is still stark.

The next five most-watched schools on this graphic were Texas A&M, Michigan State, Iowa, Oklahoma State, and TCU. In other words, you have to go outside the top 20 before you find any Big 12 schools. It's also interesting that historic powerhouses like Nebraska and Miami are absent, but both schools are a long way away from their dominance in the '80s and '90s (the Cornhuskers currently being on a streak of seven losing seasons in a row). 

I also, sadly, suspect that Houston sits among that bottom 10% on the right side of the graph.

The fact that so much college football viewership (and therefore, television revenue) is concentrated in so few schools, and that those schools mostly belong to two conferences, means that college football finds itself in an extremely unbalanced situation between the "Power Two" (the SEC and the Big 10) and everyone else (the ACC, the Big 12 and the Group of Five conferences). This has significant implications for the sport's future.

In that regard, last Friday's news that the SEC and Big 10 are "creating a joint advisory group of university presidents, chancellors and athletics directors to address the turmoil enveloping the (college football) industry" is raising some eyebrows among college football fans. Could the SEC and Big 10 be preparing to break away and create their own college football league, apart from the NCAA? It would completely change the sport as we know it, and not (in my opinion) for the better.

I love college football, but between this imbalance, the out-of-control transfer portal, and a completely-unregulated NIL system, the sport is simply not sustainable in its current form, and I worry for its future.