Explain the popularity of College Sports in the US to me

The Game Room
1

One of the things that I find strange about US Sports culture (other then baseball gloves, what you worried you might break a nail? :D) is the following that Collage sports have, especially it seems to me basketball and Gridiron (I refuse to call it football on principle). It seems to be above and beyond what other countries have where University sports are at worst amature events and at best might contain player who you could be hearing about in 5 or 10 years. You have the boat race, in the UK, many great Cricketers played for one or other of the Universities, but they became stars much after their time there and thats about it.
On the other hand in the US Collage sports seem to be a big deal.

EDIT: As this question might need discussions of culture, business and other fields, I thought the Game Room was inappropriate, please mods, if you disagree, do what you have to do. :slight_smile:

2

Collage sports? Is that where you take a football and try to hit it with a baseball bat through a hoop mounted overhead?

I think you meant college.

and I don’t think there’s a simple answer to your question.

At present, I live in the shadow of a large state university. And last Sunday, when the pastor was listing things that one must wait for, she mentioned the local college football team beating a certain rival for the first time in twenty six years.

There are no top-level professional sports teams in this town–although the nearest football and baseball franchise is only an hour/ninety minutes away. But in a different state.
College Basketball is king in this area, and I don’t know anyone with more than a passing interest in the NBA (even ignoring the whole strike thing).

I’m no help. But I felt bad about picking on your spelling, so I at least babbled a bit more in your general direction. Not sure it helped much.

3

Sheepish Been up all night. Not an excuse. Could someone please fix the spelling in the title.

EDIT Which on second thought, seems fine in the title, but not in the OP thread itself.

4

I think you’re going to find this thread moving swiftly into IMHO territory, as it’s not like there’s a wealth of research on why college sports are so popular in the U.S. As an American, here’s my shot at it:

Much of the U.S. (by area) is rural or the lower fringes of urban, and is fairly far away from a major population center. Look at, say, Nebraska (to pick an example not quite at random). There isn’t a whole hell of a lot going on out there. The nearest NFL team is either going to be the Vikings (in Minneapolis), the Broncos (in Denver), or the Chiefs (in Kansas City), all fairly far away, and there isn’t that much to do in corn country. College football teams in particular grew to fill that entertainment niche. They can grow to become a point of pride for an entire state, and help foster a sense of community and national-stage excitement in an area with a fairly low population density that doesn’t get that much of that kind of thing usually. Combine that with a typical American rooting for the underdog and the universal human tribalism inherent in team sports, and you have pretty much the only way of getting huge areas with low population densities to all unite under one banner. You’ll find that areas like Nebraska treat college football as a bigger deal than the NFL, in most cases.

From the university’s perspective, college sports teams can be major moneymakers and generate good advertising, to boot, provided you’re not Penn State at the moment. College sports players are forbidden, per NCAA regulations, to receive any recompense whatsoever for playing, so the university gets to keep all that money. As you might imagine, university officials encourage the role of college sports, in some cases, arguably, to the detriment of academics.

In short, I think it’s rooted in a couple aspects inherent to the United States, being love of sports and low population densities. This being GQ, I am a bit embarrassed not to have cites to back me up, but I’d be happy to see any sociological research that has been done on this, if any.

5

I think it’s better suited to the Game Room than GQ, especially since this is going to involve personal opinions.

Colibri
General Questions Moderator

6

I think you are mostly right BorgHunter although it is a little more complicated than that. I am from Louisiana and LSU is currently the most dominate college football team in recent memory. New Orleans has the professional New Orleans Saints who have been successful in recent years but even they can’t hold a candle to LSU at the moment. Teams that they are competing against don’t have a comparable professional team within reasonable distance. Alabama is #2 and they live and die by their college football teams because that is all they have. They have players from all over but it is still more local than the professional teams.

Major university sports (meaning college football and basketball) are basically pro-sports even though the players don’t get paid directly (or shouldn’t). Huge stadiums are built and college football and basketball coaches at the big schools often get paid more than the president of the university. We are talking big, big money. Some people question whether it is wise to co-mingle education and big-time college sports but that is the way it evolved in the U.S. Athletes aren’t supposed to be paid but they can get into schools that they wouldn’t have been able to otherwise and they have special tutoring options for them to make sure they remain eligible to play.

Not all colleges and universities in the U.S. do this. Only some do but they tend to be in very deeply.

7

Part of it, as Eureka alluded to, is that there are a lot more college teams than there are pro teams. Every town has a college near by, or in the same county, or a major college in the state. This way, there is some team that’s more or less local to root for.

Alumni are a big part of the effect; many graduates continue to be involved with their schools, especially as they get older and begin to pine for their lost youth. Buying season tickets and boosting for the home team is a lot cheaper than endowing a chair or funding a new science building, and it’s a lot more conducive to drinking and tailgate parties.

Finally, I suspect the lower level of play is more fun and exciting than professional sports; while some teams manage to recruit players and coaches who achieve nearly professional capability, most are prone to mistakes and questionable decisions; taking advantage of these errors gives other teams something to scramble after, and scrambling is more entertaining than grinding out a narrow victory by being just a little bit better than the other guys.

The demand for athletes to fill all of those positions on all of those college teams also gives a lot of kids the chance to play in front of a crowd, a chance they’ll never have in the pros; the more talented have a shot at making it into the pros, and their eagerness to show their quality also makes the games exciting in a way that professional players (holding on to what they’ve got) might not.

8

Now see, the above replies don’t nearly answer the question. Other countries have rural populations, Universities which promote sports heavily, involved Alumnai etc etc. But, nowhere is the level of following of University sport quite like the good old US and A.

9

I think part of this is because Britons just don’t understand the size & distances involved in the USA.

For example, the mentioned state of Nebraska has no professional sports teams in it. But Nebraska is roughly the size of the whole island of Great Britain (actually about 7/8th the size, or about Britain minus Wales). And it’s not even a very big state – about 15th out of the 50 states.

For someone from Lincoln, Nebraska to see a Minnesota Vikings game they would have to travel about the distance from London to Edinburgh. Or a Denver Broncos game is about the London to Geneva Switzerland distance. So their college Cornhuskers team from Lincoln Nebraska is of major importance to Nebraska sports fans. If Britons had to travel similar distances to see a professional sports team, they too would probably start following their local college teams.

10

Nice lesson. But, I am not a Briton. Or Welsh if you perfer. I still don’t get it. Distances involved are less important in the era of televised sports.

The one WAG, the US sports are of the type which have little international competition or International competition is not really the pinnecal of the sport. If you are in Oxfordshire, well your local teams are less then impressive, but you can still follow Messr Rooney, Terry, Pieterson and Wilkinson when England plays.

11

Distances are vitally important when you have to drive somewhere to see a game live at the stadium, something a lot of Americans enjoy doing.

12

Again, the US is not unique in it’s enjoyment of watching live games at the stadium and having to drive long distances.:rolleyes:

13

Do explain. I’m fascinated by your perceptions of Americans and their sports.

14

Another thing is the fact that college players are amateurs. Well, officially, they are amateurs but it’s like Kim Kardashian wearing white at her next marriage to signify purity. But people want to believe that athletes play because they “love the game” at some level. It makes it more appealing to them that Johnny Student is playing his heart out “for the game” and not for his next big contract.

But I remember in the 1980s suggesting to a co worker from Nebraska who used to go nuts on autumn Saturdays watching college football that players should get paid. After all, the coaches, schools, tv networks,etc get their money so I figured the guys doing the actual work should. I would have had better luck convincing the Pope to convert to Islam or officials at the Louvre to let me paint a mustache on the Mona Lisa.

It should be pointed out that it’s football and basketball that are massively popular. Other sports like baseball, hockey, soccer are much smaller, in most cases

15

If you want to see a professional team in the UK, France, Germany, how far does the average Frenchman, German, or Brit have to travel?

You can rolleyes all you want, but the distance/density factor is vitally important and I’m not really sure why you want to dismiss it.

Is America the only geographically big country? No. But if you look at some of the others:

Canada, Russia, Australia, for example, they all three have something in common. Namely, while they have lots of land, the vast overwhelming majority of their people don’t live anywhere outside of a few high density regions.

The Sakha Republic (one of the political subdivisions of Russia), is 3.1 million sq. km, that is bigger than Mexico, and bigger than France, Germany, and the UK combined. It has some 900,000 residents. If you look at the other political subdivisions in Siberia, you’ll see a similar picture.

Check out the population per sq. km. in any part of Canada or Australia outside of a few of the major cities.

I’ve long said that unfortunately the U.S. Census has a very different definition of urban/rural than the man in the street, and because of that many people (especially people who live in metropolitan city centers) have a warped understanding of how the rest of the country lives.

Some 70% of the United States is urban, but mind this: in the U.S. urban refers to any census-designated place with more than 2,500 people. Having in lived in many such places I can tell you 99.99% of New Yorkers or Seattle residents would not be willing to call these towns and unincorporated areas “urban.”

Further, many of the metro or urban areas that Americans live around might be centered on a city of 100,000 to 200,000 residents. There are many such cities, some even larger than that, which have no major professional sports team.

Omaha, Neb. has 400,000 people and no NFL or NBA team.

Columbus, OH has 750,000 people and no NFL or NBA team.

Norman, OK has 100,000+ residents and no NFL or NBA team.

Oklahoma City, OK has 500,000+ residents, and until 2008 had no NFL or NBA tea, they still have no NFL team.

The entire state of Alabama has over 4 million people and no NFL or NBA team, in addition the states of Mississippi, Iowa, Kentucky, and South Carolina have no major sports teams.

16

Um, yeah, we pretty much are. We’re larger than most other Western countries, save for Australia (which has no non-coastal population) and Russia (whose sports no one talks about.) We can’t even attend a home game in pro sports without driving for longer than it would take most to cross their entire country. For instance, I can drive five minutes to the local college. Or I can drive six or more hours to see the St. Louis team–which I’ve done exactly once in my entire life–and it wasn’t any better than the games I’ve seen around here.

People here are trying to answer your question, but if you’re just going to act all pissy because we come up with an answer that makes sense to us, then why should we bother?

17

You’re getting it all backwards. The reason professional football (and basketball) exists in the US is to cash in on the popularity of college sports. A century ago, college football was the only sport being played after mid-October. Harvard vs. Yale went to the front of the sports page.

Sports back then were local, so you’d go to the local college game and root for the local team (or the college you graduated from).

In the 1920s, when sports began to get a mass audience, college football was already established. The NFL wasn’t even founded until 1920, and started out as a way to highlight well-known college athletes (there was an entire league founded to highlight Red Grange). And unless you were near a big city (and there were very few pro sports franchises west of the Mississippi until the 1970s), you followed a team nearby. That meant college.

18

Yes. Note that professional teams did not even exist in the South and the middle of the country until at least the 60s; until the Dallas Cowboys were formed, the Redskins playing out of Washington DC were the southernmost team in the NFL. The NBA’s Hawks didn’t move to Atlanta until 1968.

Here is an article about all of the NFL’s expansions since the 60s. Notice all of those cities are in the South and Midwest (except for the Seahawks, who are also geographically isolated).

Here is a chart detailing expansion in the NBA since the 60s. Again, notice where all of those cities are.

19

Generally, batted baseballs travel at a significantly higher speed than batted cricket balls (~90 mph vs ~60 mph). Trying to catch a batted baseball – given modern balls and bats – will lead to broken fingers before long.

Also, helping the defense out with gloves enables us to finish a game a lot faster. Most Americans would consider a five day test match unbearably time-consuming and tedious. Different tastes.

And there’s the difference. The best college football and basketball players compete at a very high level, and it’s quite common for a player to leave school and quickly become a huge NFL/NBA star.

The NFL and NBA are akin to the Premier League, with college teams analogous to the lower divisions of the FA. For a variety of historical reasons, minor-league professional football and basketball have never really caught on, and so college teams are the feeder systems for the pro leagues.

In baseball and hockey, there are lower professional leagues, and thus college baseball and hockey are very minor sports.

20

Maybe, but (other when charging a bunt, which will not be hit at 90mph), baseball players never get closer than about 55ft from the bat. Cricketers will field 6ft from the bat, without gloves. Although, to be fair, if those fielders see tha batsman about to take a big cut, they will be bailing out big time, not trying to catch it.

As to the OP, there also seems to be much more ongoing affinity for their alma mater among Americans than in the UK (don’t know about other countries), possibly excepting Oxbridge. Whether that is caused at least in part by college sports, I don’t know, but it gives a way of following their college for the rest of their lives.