By the time this article goes to press, I’ll have just gotten home from Madison, having spent Saturday at the Iowa vs Wisconsin football game. For as long as I can remember, I’ve loved watching sports, especially college football. I still do. But my pilgrimage to Madison on Saturday is more of a goodbye to it than anything else, with the game being one of the last ones I still want to see live and up close.

The fact of the matter is football in America is becoming more problematic than it has been since the early 1900s when President Teddy Roosevelt considered banning the game due to the violence and deaths that routinely took place on the field.

But college football in my lifetime has always felt somewhat outside the idea of violence. It’s about the pageantry of college athletics at its highest level; the tailgates, the students and alumni, the band, the elusive concept of college spirit. Whatever those things are, or whatever they mean, they feel tangible. And yet the fact remains that modern college football is all about money.

For us students, it means increasing fees every semester to support the athletic programs. For the alumni, it means constant inquiries into donations to support the teams when donations could be far better spent on education, something that the universities are supposed to be prioritizing. For the NCAA, it means making hundreds of millions, even billions, in profits as it exploits “amateur” athletes who are supposedly justly compensated via scholarship money, a problematic argument in its own right. And in the case of football, it means the NFL not having to spend a single dime on a minor league talent system, all the while creating rules that prevent adults from entering straight into their league.

Make no mistake about it, everyone involved in the scheme is well aware of what is happening, and increasingly so, so are the fans. The problem is it’s hard to draw the line, but the day is fast approaching when that line must be drawn. With the increase in student debt with no end in sight, there is no longer an argument which supports students continuing to shell out fee money to support a team that might only play six or seven home games a year.

Moreover, given what we now know about traumatic brain injuries and their long term effects on people who play football, it becomes increasingly morally questionable to follow the sport, especially when we spend our dollars on participating in something we know is harming us. There’s also the question of PEDs in the games, something which the NFL, though they don’t care nor will they admit to it, has a very serious problem with which I can’t help but think bleeds down rather heavily into the bigger football programs in the country. To be fair, I have no idea how that translates to a FCS team like UNI, but I suspect it exists within the FCS in plenty of places.

And yet we continue on with our tailgates, our ticket buying, our buying of jerseys of players who will never be fairly compensated and, if you’re like me, you plan your Saturdays around which games to watch from 11 a.m. to 11 p.m. Maybe some of you are like me, and you no longer feel good about this attachment but can’t break away from the game, but it’s a question we all need to start asking ourselves every time we watch or attend a football game.

As for me, I think I’ve got one more in me (Iowa vs Nebraska), though probably not this year. And, at least for the rest of this year, I’ll probably still watch games every Saturday, but my childhood nostalgia for college football is just about empty. I suspect for the good of us all, the sooner we say goodbye, the better off we’ll all be. Then again, go Panthers! I hope they make the playoffs.