When did high school/college sports become "important?"

So, as long as I can remember (I’m 48,) it’s not unusual for some high schools and colleges to almost revere the players on their sports teams and cut them slack regarding grades and/or behavior.
So, why and when did this happen? Is it an American worship of manly men doing manly things? Is it because it affords the possibility of a great paying job to the non-scholarly?
Please help me understand the history and logic behind this.

Thanks in advance - DESK

Prior to the 1950s and '60s, college football and basketball were much bigger deals than the NFL and NBA. You could almost turn it around and ask, “when did pro sports become ‘important’?”

Except for soccer and perhaps baseball pretty much most organised sports grew up in modern recognised form in academic institutions. Not surprising.

It’s capitalism in action.

You take all the students out of class and parade physically fit young males in tight pants and exaggerated shoulders in front of them while pretty young females in short skirts and tight sweaters whip the students into an adoring frenzy to make them feel an emotional concern for the outcome of the upcoming ritual combat.

The ultimate purpose is to sell more hot dogs at the game, thereby enriching the owner of the concession stand.

Right – they may have grown *commercially *profitable as we now think of it when the pros became big and the colleges became their farm league, but school varsity sports have had a prominent place since the 19th century.

In most cases( if not almost all) the stand is run by the local Boosters Club and the money goes to help buy equipment for the sports teams.

Actually, soccer did too. The original rules of the sport can be considered the Cambridge Rules of 1848. While no copy of them exists today, there is a copy of the 1856 rules at Cambridge which shows a game that differs from the modern game only in that you could catch the ball and, by doing so, earn a free kick. An offside rule exists, the goal has both width and maximum height (a change from prior football concepts), and the players aren’t allowed to hold, push, or trip a player. Balls out of play over the sideline are thrown back in; balls out of play over the end line are re-started with a free kick (not moved to the corner of the field until later).

The dispute that led to Rugby football as an off-shoot of the football we call “soccer” came between schools that had differing visions of the rules (Rugby school being the primary proponent of the idea of running with the ball and allowing the runner to be hacked down, or “tackled”). And the various non-school clubs that participated in the formation of the Football Association in 1863 were made up primarily of various schools’ old boys (graduates). The transformation of the game into a sport for the common factory workers occurred primarily after the formation of the FA in the 1860s. It should be noted for completeness that there were several ideas incorporated eventually into the laws of the game that were developed in Sheffield by members of the Sheffield Cricket Club, who were looking for a sport that could keep them in shape during the winter.

To my own UK perspective it seems a peculiarly USA phenomenon.

Over here we have no televised sport from academic institutions. it simply does not appear on the radar.
There is an annual boat race between Oxford and Cambridge which is interesting for an afternoon but that is it. I can’t vouch for it but I suspect most of Europe is the same.

Why it should be so I don’t know other that we do tend to have more developed systems of feeder leagues plus promotion/relegation so there is plenty going on outside of the big leagues and perhaps no need for college sport to fill that gap.

IIRC, the University Match between Oxford and Cambridge (cricket) I saw televised (and pretty full at the Stadium. And Public Schools-University-County-Test side (Alister Cook is a recent example) is still a pretty common route in cricket. But, yes, the amount of attention given to college sports os rather different, college sports are an end to themselves there as opposed to merely being nurseries for the future.

Renaissance man, also called Universal Man, Italian Uomo Universale, an ideal that developed in Renaissance Italy from the notion expressed by one of its most accomplished representatives, Leon Battista Alberti (1404–72), that “a man can do all things if he will.” The ideal embodied the basic tenets of Renaissance Humanism, which considered man the centre of the universe, limitless in his capacities for development, and led to the notion that men should try to embrace all knowledge and develop their own capacities as fully as possible.”