I Still Watch Football. I’m Just Not Sure I Care Anymore.

Football season has started, and yesterday I watched most of Stanford’s opening game against Hawaii.

Apparently I haven’t actually given up on football as much as I sometimes claim.

Stanford won 37–27, and I found myself following most of the game. Old loyalties are difficult to kill. I have followed Stanford football for more years than I care to count, although I still have trouble accepting that my West Coast team now belongs to something called the Atlantic Coast Conference. Stanford’s schedule this year includes Miami, Duke, Georgia Tech, Wake Forest, Louisville and Virginia Tech. Apparently geography has become optional.

I’ll probably watch the 49ers when they open their season against the Rams in Australia too. Partly because I’ve been a 49ers fan since John Brodie was quarterback, with a several-year diversion to the Rams while I lived in Southern California. And partly because playing an NFL game at the Melbourne Cricket Ground is strange enough that I want to see what it looks like. It will be the NFL’s first regular-season game in Australia.

So, I still watch football.

I’m just not sure I care about it the way I used to.

Football Used to Mean Fall

For much of my life, football season was more than the beginning of another sports schedule.

It was one of the cultural signs that summer was ending.

Saturdays became college football days with tailgates for home games. Sundays belonged to the pros. Rivalries resumed. People talked about their teams at work, at school and over dinner. You might have followed the same team because you attended the university, grew up nearby or simply inherited the allegiance from your father.

The rivalries mattered partly because the geography mattered.

Stanford played other West Coast schools. Season-ending rivalries capped the year before bowl season started. Oregon played Oregon State. Washington played Washington State. USC played UCLA. Stanford played Cal.

You knew who the enemy was.

College conferences actually represented regions of the country. The Pacific Coast had the Pac-8, then the Pac-10, then the Pac-12.

Now Stanford plays in the Atlantic Coast Conference along with Cal. How does that happen?

I realize airplanes have gotten better, but the Atlantic still hasn’t moved any closer to Palo Alto.

The reason, of course, is money.

Television money became more important than geography, tradition and in some cases rivalries that took generations to build. Schools moved. Conferences expanded. Others collapsed. Schedules became whatever produced the most valuable television package.

From a business standpoint, perhaps it all makes sense.

From this fan’s standpoint, something got lost.

The NFL Has Changed Too

Professional football hasn’t rearranged the map quite as dramatically, but the business surrounding the game has changed.

Betting is now everywhere.

The NFL recently renewed DraftKings and FanDuel as official sports-betting partners and added Fanatics as a third. Those companies can promote betting using NFL branding, appear at major NFL events and integrate with NFL digital properties. Americans legally wagered an estimated $30 billion on the 2025 NFL season.

That is no longer a side business quietly operating around football.

It is part of football’s commercial ecosystem.

Watch a game and you hear about the spread, the over-under, parlays and individual player propositions. The quarterback doesn’t merely need to play well. Somebody needs him to throw for more than 276½ yards.

A running back can have a perfectly good afternoon and still disappoint thousands of people because he gained 78 yards instead of 80.

Fantasy football creates a similar but slightly different relationship.

You may want your team to win while simultaneously needing a player on the other team to score two touchdowns because he happens to be on your fantasy roster.

At some point the question stops being simply:

Did my team win?

Instead, every player and every play becomes a separate outcome.

From Teams to Transactions

That may be the change that bothers me more than the money itself.

Football used to ask you to care about a team.

Increasingly, the business surrounding football asks you to care about outcomes.

Did this player score?

Did that quarterback throw enough yards?

Did the combined score exceed the betting line?

Did my fantasy receiver catch eight passes?

Did my four-team parlay survive?

All of those things can make a game more interesting to somebody. I understand why betting and fantasy have become enormously popular.

But they create a different kind of fan.

The old allegiance was collective.

My team.

My school.

My city.

My conference.

The newer relationship can become intensely individual.

My wager.

My fantasy roster.

My point spread.

My outcome.

That may be good business. I’m less certain it is good for the emotional connection that originally made sports important.

Maybe I’m the One Who Changed

There is an obvious alternative explanation.

Maybe football hasn’t changed nearly as much as I think it has.

Maybe I have.

Fifty years ago, the outcome of a Stanford game mattered more to me than it does now. I had more emotional investment in the teams, rivalries and seasons.

That probably happens with age.

There are only so many things you can remain passionately concerned about forever.

And yet I don’t think the change is entirely mine.

If Stanford still played a mostly West Coast schedule inside a recognizable regional conference, I suspect I would feel differently about it. The Big Game against Cal still means something precisely because the history survived —  and because of all the memories attached to it.

Similarly, when I watch the 49ers, I still care whether they win.

But I don’t care whether somebody’s third-string receiver gets the final four yards necessary to complete somebody else’s parlay.

Apparently I am becoming a minority.

More Successful and Less Meaningful?

Here is the contradiction I find interesting.

Football is not struggling.

College football generates enormous television audiences and increasingly enormous amounts of money. The NFL may be one of the most commercially successful sports organizations in the world.

Stadiums will be full. Television ratings will be huge. Betting companies will make money. Networks will make money. Teams will make money. Players will make money.

So this isn’t another story about something dying.

Maybe it is the opposite.

Can something become more commercially successful while becoming less meaningful to some of the people who once loved it?

The business of football has become extraordinarily good at monetizing almost every part of the experience.

Games are television products.

Conference membership becomes television inventory.

Players become fantasy assets.

Individual plays become betting opportunities.

Even a game in Australia becomes another way to expand the global market.

None of that necessarily makes the football itself worse.

But it certainly changed when or why I watch and why I bother.

I’ll Probably Still Turn It On

When Stanford plays Miami next Friday night, I’ll probably check the score and may watch part of the game unless something more interesting comes up.

When the 49ers and Rams play in Australia, I’ll almost certainly watch some of it because the novelty alone is enough to get me there.

Old habits are hard to break.

Football will still tell me that fall has arrived. Saturdays will still have games on television. Sundays will still belong largely to the NFL.

But I don’t have quite as much skin in the game as I once did.

Maybe that says something about getting older.

Maybe it says something about football.

Probably both.

What I’m less certain about is whether the next generation will care about teams the way mine did — or whether they will care about players, fantasy scores, betting slips and individual outcomes instead.

Football may be more successful than ever.

I’m just no longer sure we’re all watching the same game.