Football is a dying sport. College aged kids don’t have that much enthusiasm for it. Combine that with the reality that the Chinese and the Indian kids don’t give a damn about game day, they’re in the library. Also parents and students are getting pissed that they have to rack up thousands of dollars of debt while some semi-literate who can’t read at an eighth-grade level gets a free ride. If the students at Alabama don’t care, they don’t care anywhere.
College age kids today are mostly wimps. Beyond that college costs are inflated for a number of reasons, Among the reasons are faculty that only teach one-half the load they taught twenty years ago, administrative costs have exploded due to regulations and bloat, building are now charged to students through fees, many institutions use tuition for athletics while some prohibit tuition use for athletics (Georgia for one), excess scholarships for study abroad, etc.