re: Have wealthier whites been abandoning college football for a while now?

If this is the case, then who is buying up all those expensive season tickets to the college games?
Yeah, I see it insofar as the NFL goes, but college football doesn't seem to be reflecting this - at least not in the south. The thing that is really starting to piss people off right now is that the SEC and NCAA are feeling their oats and trying to dictate policies and legislation that should only come from the legislature of the individual states or their voters/citizens.

A lot of us are fed up with the SEC and NCAA reactions to Mississippi's state flag. It's their flag, and it's their issue. We're also still pissed about the bullshite that sports entities tried to pull in North Carolina regarding the made up issue about restrooms for transgenders and other "non-binary" genders.

You may have a point though, on the whole, as more people become truly "woke" to the fact that we can live quite well without professional athletes who provide nothing but entertainment. And, as much as I love football, the universities are institutions of higher learning (although it's trending more toward indoctrination these days). Our respective Alma Maters could indeed survive without sports teams, but we would surely miss them.