Humbly I think that's a fairly ridiculous statement for such a tradition-drenched pastime.
It has changed an order of magnitude more in the last 6 years than the prior 60, no reasonable person could deny that.
From the day they first started charging money for tickets it was a scam that the players weren't getting paid. What has been done first in an effort to prevent that (people forget and obfuscate how much of this was an attempt to avoid paying players) and then to account and adapt to is the dictionary definition of throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
It took college football 33 years before the fist bowl game was established, 66 before the second, 96 before we had 10 bowl games. 127 years after the founding of college football we had 18 bowl games (this would be 1996). In a 10 year span that number ballooned to 32 by 2006. By 2015 there were 41 bowls.
I'd argue the rapid bowl expansion in the late 90s and early aughts, along with BCS, was every bit as transformative to the sport as what is going on now.
You could also argue that the NCAA implementation of D-1A criteria 1981 (minimum stadium size and attendance standards - a major step in the commercialization of college football), which forced the Ivy League out of top tier football was in the same category.
Or the rise of athletic scholarships, which were not standard until the 1950s?
Or the shift of broadcast rights from the NCAA to the conferences, forced by a Supreme Court ruling in 1984?
College football in 1869 was vastly different from college football in 1910, which was vastly different from college football in 1950, which was vastly different from college football in 1980, which was vastly different from college football in 2010.