There was a time when watching your favorite college football team wasn’t as simple as opening an app.
Sometimes, you had to pay extra to watch it on television.
Welcome to the strange world of college football pay-per-view. The Gen Z mind couldn’t even comprehend.
Throughout the 1990s and 2000s, schools would occasionally put games behind a paywall—particularly non-conference games that weren’t attractive enough for the major networks.
Want to watch your team?
That’ll be $19.95.
You’d call the cable company, order the game, and spend the afternoon hoping the broadcast was actually worth the money.
And unlike today, there was no DVR, YouTube clip or social media feed waiting for you if you decided not to buy it.
If you missed the game, you missed the game.
For college football fans, pay-per-view became one of the stranger rituals of the pre-streaming era.
A Saturday afternoon spent flipping through the channels.
A phone call to order the game.
And then finally seeing your team’s logo appear on the screen.
Today, you can watch college football from virtually anywhere.
Back then?
Sometimes $19.95 stood between you and your Saturday.
And somehow, we thought that was perfectly normal.
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