It Just Means More: College Football as a Case Study for Public Affairs Courses

Even though it can be a challenge to find good case studies, they are a key pedagogical tool in public affairs classrooms, offering students illustrations of complex theoretical points. Given this, the authors contend that college football (CFB) offers many advantages as a public affairs case study. The novelty of CFB lies not just the temporal alignment with the fall semester and the extensiveness of the media industry surrounding it, but also in how many key concepts of public affairs programs are illustrated by it. The authors offer numerous examples for leveraging CFB in the classroom, including suggested in-class exercises, such as using team rankings to demonstrate logic problems in policy analysis, analyzing the institutions of awarding national championships, or examining the publicness of CFB and whether it constitutes a public good.