By Chris Marler
Freshman, early enrollees, and former five stars turned projected starters all getting almost meaningful reps in front of a half empty stadium. Or in some cases all those things mentioned happen in front of a success starved sold out crowd of 90,000 in places like Lincoln and Tuscaloosa.
That is what a spring game is supposed to look like.
Not anymore. Welcome to college football in 2025. Quarterbacks are negotiating seven-figure deals, Indiana is a football school, and spring games have turned into an exhibition rivaling a state fair or elementary school field day.
That’s what spring games now look like.
This trend started last year when five Power Four programs decided to opt out of the game altogether. Those were schools like Vanderbilt, Minnesota, and Northwestern who were skipping the scrimmage due to stadium construction. Other schools like Ole Miss held a loosely structured 7-on-7 event with a hot dog eating contest. Joey Chestnut eating a million hot dogs in Oxford, Mississippi may have sounded like a ridiculous idea. But as dumb as some people thought the idea was a year ago, it’s now clear that Lane Kiffin was once again ahead of the sport.
Fast forward to this season and Texas A&M is the only SEC team holding a traditional spring game on television. The SEC gave teams an option this year to have a traditional game broadcast on the ESPN family of networks or to have a 30 minute special on their program to air on SEC Network. Fifteen of the 16 teams across the league opted for the 30 minutes of television.
Reasons given changed from school to school like a 17-year-old recruit putting on one hat after another during an announcement ceremony.
Texas, one of the first to announce they wouldn’t play a traditional game, said they wouldn’t play because they were going to a model that was more similar to NFL OTA’s due to the grind of playing 16 games last season. Others like Alabama and LSU opted for a fan day approach with a brief practice followed by autographs and fun for the fans on the field. Oklahoma will be holding a fan event that will help raise money for NIL featuring an NFL Combine adjacent event with their players.
It’s unclear what kind of crowd these events will draw, but it is clear that this is the new world of college football and it’s here to stay.
