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The original was posted on /r/cfb by /u/ProctorDoctor500 on 2024-07-24 16:22:39+00:00.

The 2024 Summer Olympics are only a few days away. You should know what the Olympics are so I’m not gonna bother explaining them. With the 2028 Los Angeles Summer Olympics, the US will have hosted 8 Olympic Games: 5 Summer Olympics and 3 Winter Olympics. The last time the Summer Olympics were hosted in the United States before LA won the 2028 Olympic bid was in 1996 when Atlanta hosted them. Part of the reason the US is so dominant at the Olympics? College Athletics and it’s various Olympic teams, 75% of Olympic Athletes on Team USA have competed collegiately. Now Football isn’t a sport that has been played at the Olympics since 1932, so how would have a failed bid affected College Football? The answer, like most things in College Football, is money.

Hosting the Olympics is very expensive in the modern day. In 2017, when bidding for the 2024 Summer Olympic Games were going on, the Budapest, Rome and Hamburg bids were all pulled due to expenses being more than anticipated by the prospective host cities. Leaving only the Los Angeles and Paris bids, which led to the host cities for the 2024 and 2028 games being chosen simultaneously. Lots of new infrastructure must be built if it wasn’t previously there before. The NFL actually helped the case for Los Angeles’s 2024 Summer Olympic Bid thanks to the Rams and Chargers wanting to potentially move there, helping the facilitation of the creation of SoFi Stadium. The 1984 Los Angeles Summer Olympics were actually the most profitable Olympic Games ever due to the reuse of existing venues and more private funding, raking in 250 Million in profit.

So how would Chicago’s 2016 Summer Olympics Bid have changed the script for College Football? The 2016 Chicago bid had the two defining elements that made the 1984 Los Angeles Summer Olympics so successful: preexisting venues and private funding. Some of the pre-existing venues mentioned for the 2016 Summer Olympics Bid were at FBS colleges, mainly: Northwestern, Northern Illinois and Illinois. Other notable universities mentioned as potential venues were Non-Football D1 members (Chicago State, Illinois-Chicago and Loyola Chicago) and D3 University of Chicago. The Olympic Stadium would have been built in Washington Park, right next to UChicago. There was a proposal in the bid for the Pentathlon to take place entirely on Northwestern’s campus, including showing Ryan Field.

This is purely speculation but, the Olympics are a huge visibility boost and prestige boost. The Olympic bid’s promise was to be done on exclusively private funding. If that was done, then Chicago gets a large international prestige boost at little cost to Chicago taxpayers. This likely makes Chicago equal to New York and LA in international eyes to prospective investors and foreign companies. An already prestigious university like UChicago having the Olympic Stadium right next to their campus boosts their international profile immensely.

Now applying a similar logic like that to College Football, Northwestern would have benefitted immensely from the 2016 Olympics which would have featured their campus and thus would have increased their profile both internationally and domestically. My main question is how large would the recruiting advantage have been? I couldn’t find any data on how the 1996 Atlanta Olympics affected Georgia Tech’s recruiting so this is just me flying blind here (although it’s possibly just a non-factor, but that’s less fun). I doubt that Northwestern turns into Alabama or Clemson in terms of recruiting, especially with their high academic standards but I believe they get to recruiting at a better level. In real life, Northwestern was hovering in between the 6-8 win range with Pat Fitzgerald with the occasional 10 win seasons. Would Northwestern have won the Big Ten during the late 2010s with a potential benefit like that? I’m not sure, maybe they could have defeated 2018 Ohio State in the Big Ten Championship but it’s unclear. What likely does change is how consistent Northwestern is with potential better recruiting advantages, maybe they have more 9-10 seasons, perhaps they have more Big Ten championship appearances and are viewed as a respectable Big Ten program, maybe they don’t fall off through 2021 and 2022? Fellow Big Ten mate Illinois would have benefited from the Olympics too, but they’re not right next to Chicago like Northwestern is. I think they still are better than they are in real life if they get better recruits, the problem is can they leverage that into getting better recruits with a rocky coaching cycle. Northwestern’s coaching situation was stable while Illinois (in real life) wasn’t with the circle of Ron Zook, Tim Beckman, Bill Cubit and Lovie Smith through the early 2010s.

However, I believe the biggest College Football winner from a 2016 Summer Olympics in Chicago is Northern Illinois. NIU in real life was pretty good in the Early 2010s, in 2012 they won the MAC and made the Orange Bowl against Florida State. In 2014 they won the MAC again and beat Northwestern in Ryan Field. In 2015 they made the MAC championship, beat No 20 Toledo and lost by only 1 score to No 1 Ohio State at The Shoe. Their 2016 season had them finish 5-7 but they would win the MAC again in 2018. NIU was one of the more consistently successful MAC programs. NIU is located in DeKalb, Illinois which is a suburb directly in the Chicago Metropolitan area. In real life, NIU had the 6th best recruiting class in the MAC in 2016, a lot of which being in-state talent. According to a Bleacher Report article from 2009, Chicago and NIU had some agreements about involvements in the Bid that both sides forgot about that would have benefitted NIU and DeKalb greatly (including free renovations on NIU’s Husky Stadium). Let’s say this “Olympic Boost” were to have happened, NIU likely would have access to greater athletic infrastructure and facilities that the rest of the MAC didn’t have. NIU could have continued racking up MAC Championships and maybe even a NY6 appearance. A boost in Football power thanks to new infrastructure, better recruiting and more winning in the country’s third largest media market could have led to NIU joining the Big 12. Back in 2016, NIU was one of 17 schools supposedly interviewed for Big 12 membership by the conference. With a boost like this, they would have emerged as a stronger candidate and might have been a front-runner for future expansion. A stronger, more dominant NIU likely leaves the MAC with a sizeable hole if they join a power conference, like if NIU joins the Big 12 in 2023, that could open the door for Western Kentucky and Middle Tennessee State to join the MAC like Western Kentucky had wanted to do in real life, but MTSU getting cold feet prevented that from happening. With an open spot due to NIU’s departure, WKU could probably convince MTSU leave the Conference USA to join the MAC (and then UMass would probably have rejoined the MAC anyway getting it to 14 teams).

Would Loyola Chicago, Chicago State and UIC, three Football-less NCAA Division 1 Chicago schools have tried to make FCS teams after a 2016 Chicago Summer Olympics? No, because Title IX still exists and the financial strain of a Football team would still be pretty strong. The only one I think might have tried to make a Football team is Chicago State, who in 2023 explored the idea of adding an FCS team. UChicago also gets a fun 10,000 person stadium right next to them after the games (the 80,000 capacity stadium they would have built in Washington Park would have been significantly reduced in size after the games), maybe if they play Football games there more people show up? It could have created one of the better D3 homefield environments, but that requires the student body to care about the sport, which I’m not sure they would have.

So why did the 2016 Chicago Summer Olympics Bid fail? The supposed cost of building the Olympic Village where they were building, actually did require some taxpayer money, about 500 million of it, which people didn’t like after the bid was built on the idea of using private funding for everything. In addition to that, there might have been some lingering resentment in the international community against American cities with well put together bids. The bidding for the 1996 Summer Olympics had Atlanta win the bid over the internationally favored Athens, which pissed off the Greek and Australian media who had their own bids submitted for Athens and Melbourne. Media outlets in those countries surmised that the Atlanta Olympic Committee and Coca-Cola had under the table dealings with the IOC. Now back to the 2016 bidding process, the Chicago bid was deemed to have the largest technical foundation but lacked “international relationships”. The shortlist came down to Chicago, Tokyo, Madrid and Rio. Chicago was the first bid eliminated in voting and Rio won the bid. How the 2016 Rio Olympics went is a full other story that is better not told in a post on the College Football subreddit.

We will get to see how the Olympics might potentially affect College Football coming up in 2028 with the Los Angeles 2028 Summer Olympics. Unlike the Chicago bid, the 2028 LA bid had a lot more public support behind it. The proposal has the Olympic Village being placed on UCLA’s campus, which will essentially act as a walking advertisement for the university. One thing to note about the 2028 Olympics is that they will feature Fl…

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