Attendance is dropping across all spectator sports, college and professional. It has nothing to do with the perception of the sport becoming farcical.
I'm curious as to why you think it's a total farce
now versus having been a total farce from the very beginning. That's my biggest point of disagreement with this stance, the notion that teams either weren't cheating, or cheated nowhere near as badly, back in the day. Like I said earlier in the thread, SMU had a weekly payroll in the early 80s and had some guys making 6 figures. Other rule-breaking like point shaving was way more prevalent back in the day. For all the talk about a lack of parity, college sports has always been that way. In any given era, the sport has been dominated by a relative handful of schools.
I know y'all won't hear it from
@bamawriter so perhaps you'll hear it from a fellow UT fan...I can't help but wonder if the bemoaning of the current state of the sport has anything to do with the fact that we suck. It isn't a big stretch to wonder that if Tennessee was really good right now, we wouldn't have people coming in here and saying "Yeah, I mean this sport is a total farce like professional wrestling."