As noted upthread, this is absolutely true for football and basketball, but much less so for hockey and baseball.
While there are certainly college baseball and hockey programs in the U.S., they’re more regional in their popularity, and even large schools with big athletic programs often don’t field teams in one or both of those sports.
Further, most U.S. high school athletes who show promise in one of those two sports are more likely to sign a professional contract coming right out of high school (and then spending several years in the minor professional leagues, developing their skills) rather than playing collegiately before potentially turning pro; relatively few U.S.-born MLB or NHL players played in college before turning pro.
Activity fees also partially paid for various clubs; drama, model train (RPI had a huge building basement setup, RC airplane. Any organization could get funding - it was like applying for a grant.
The minor league baseball teams do move between levels as well as changing which major league team they are affiliated with. Take the Round Rock Express for example.
They started out at the double A level back in 2000, and moved up to triple A in 2005. They have also moved back and forth between being affiliated with the Houston Astros and Texas Rangers. That being said, I don’t think the change in what level they compete at or which team they are affiliated with has anything to do with their performance on the field.
The way the European leagues do it is that last season, the Chicago White Sox and Colorado Rockies would have gone down to AAA, and maybe Norfolk and Portland would have been promoted to the AL and NL. Similarly, Chattanooga would have gone from AAA to AA, and the Tennessee Smokies would move up to AA. Something like that anyway.
US teams don’t really do that because the league systems had a different historical basis; IIRC college football and basketball preceded the professional leagues, and baseball for whatever reason has had the minor league affiliate system in place for a very long time as well. They could do something like that, but I think there’s too much money in keeping the White Sox playing in the majors than there is in relegating them and promoting some second-tier city like Norfolk.
You are correct. Collegiate football dates back to the late 19th century, and basketball became established as an interscholastic sport around the turn of the century. The NFL wasn’t established until 1920, and the NBA in 1946; up until the 1950s, college football and basketball generally drew more fan interest than the professional leagues. There wasn’t a whole lot of money, relatively speaking, in pro football and basketball until the 1960s (for football) and 1980s (for basketball), when their TV contracts became very lucrative.
We have a situation now, in MLB, where two teams (the A’s and the Rays) are playing in minor-league ballparks this season, and apparently will be doing so for several years.
The A’s are in the process of moving from Oakland to Las Vegas, but their new stadium in Vegas won’t even have its initial groundbreaking until June; they are playing at a minor-league park in Sacramento for at least the next two-three years.
The Rays’ stadium, Tropicana Field, had its roof torn off by Hurricane Milton last October. The Rays were already in negotiations to build a new stadium, so it’s not clear that the Tropicana Field roof will ever be replaced; for now, they are playing at a stadium in Tampa which is the home of a Yankees Single-A team. There are no solid plans at this point for a new MLB-level stadium in Tampa, as a proposed stadium project (which would have been completed in 2028) was cancelled by the Rays in March.
Both the A’s and the Rays had been working on proposals for new stadiums (in Oakland and Tampa, respectively) for at least 20 years. In both cases, the stadiums where those teams have now wound up playing are nowhere near MLB capacity nor amenity levels, and I’m certain that the league is not happy about this turn of events. It’s an indicator of just how broken the system of building new stadiums is (including the general expectation by the teams that cities and states will help to foot the bill), that both teams are now stuck in sub-standard parks for years. European-style relegation and promotion would have that happening every single year.
College athletics is out of control in many ways such as many players already making millions from NIL and conferences conglomerating power and money while others get shafted (PAC-2 for example).
The other problem with taxes going to pay college athletes, as others pointed out, is that it leads to an arms race among states. If Texas taxpayers are willing to pay taxes to fund the Longhorns but Oklahoma taxpayers aren’t willing to pay to get free agents to the Sooners, then what? And then you even get into intra-state rivalries. Texas and Texas A&M are both public universities; how do you divvy up the taxpayer funding for their free-agent athletes when they’re in a bidding war against each other?
This thread from two years ago pulled a lot of data together, but came up short of a general consensus on whether college sports make or cost the institutions money.
This is not true. There are currently three minor football leagues in the US, the United Football League, the Gridiron Developmental Football League, and the Rivals Professional Football League. The UFL may not consider itself a minor league, but many players from that league did sign NFL contracts, and I think their player contracts explicitly allow them to move to the NFL.
The NBA has an official development league, the NBA G league. There are also other unaffiliated minor leagues in basketball,
I’m not sure that anything but the UFL counts (GDFL doesn’t even have a website), and even then they’re not likely to be any more successful than the AAFL, XFL 1 or 2, or USFL.
And I’d be willing to bet that a middling SEC team would probably wipe the floor with any given UFL team.
The college leagues are the de-facto second level of sports in the US for football and basketball, even if there are things like the G-League out there.