In the UK, for example, the major sports like soccer and rugby have little or nothing to do with colleges and universities. The teams often originate from factories and the owners were industrial magnates. Fancy book-learning skills were not really considered a priority.
The concept of the ‘Jock’, with very little between his ears but good sporting ability being shoe-horned into a university education with special courses and tutors seems to be very much an American thing.
How did that happen? Is it just football, or other sports as well?
Trust me many Americans wonder the same and would be pleased if both colleges and high schools would drop sports. And in reality only mens basketball and football or some others on occasion are money makers.
Thing is the tradition is so ingrained as part of our culture it wont ever be changed. For example one associates Notre Dame University, University of Texas, and UCLA not with their science programs but names like Fighting Irish, Longhorns, and Bruins.
I’d guess its because US colleges are often less than 100 years old whereas UK colleges like say Oxford date back what… 400 years or so? Back to when sports were uncommon. Those schools set the standard that newer colleges there followed.
Only two of the four major sports in the US use the colleges as the major feeder system to the pros; football and basketball. The other two (hockey and baseball) take many kids from college but a more common approach is to draft them right out of high school and start them in the lower professional leagues.
One trend in basketball is that players could come right out of high school and into the pros if the rules allowed, but they’re required to complete at least one year of college. It might be raised to two years soon. Some football players enter the draft before graduation but they generally need to get bigger/stronger before they play at the NFL level.
For all intents and purposes, college football and basketball are the minor leagues for those sports. There is a huge infrastructure built up now, with a ginormous fan base that is self-perpetuating.
Football and basketball and the two pro sports most associated with colleges in the US, though there are championships in hockey (Go Union!) and baseball. In the case of basketball and football, the sports originally were only college sports and became pro later (basketball, after all, was invented at a college).
In the case of football, it was taken up by college students, first intramurally and later against other college teams. College (and high school) football was the only form of football until 1919, and was far more popular than pro football until the 1950s. (As an aside, clearly rugby was developed at a school). As to why colleges, they were able to organize and provide enough people to field a team.
Baseball, OTOH, was not originally connected to colleges; early versions of it were played during the Civil War between military units, and it grew into having teams from each town. It’s never been a big college sport, except in a few schools.
Hockey developed similarly to baseball, except in Canada. Again, except for a handful of schools, it’s not a big sport.
Sports such as track and field and swimming are centered on colleges because they were able to provide the facilities needed.
I assume too it started that those with the money to go to college had the leisure time to also practice enough to excel in sports. Football especially you don’t practice without a sponsor, pads and a helmet, the minimal wear, would still be expensive. Places to play football would be rare except in rich neighborhoods and colleges. Basketball was designed to be played in indoor gymnasiums.
As the sports programs became more of a business, the colleges went out of their way to recruit better players. As I understand it, one of the biggest differences between the USA and Canada is that Canada does not allow(?) athletic scholarships. Thus, anyone playing on a Canadian college team is a paying student or on scholarship due to brains. The really good athletes get scholarships to the USA.
Note the one game that was fairly professional before college sports became big business was baseball, and it has farm teams and lesser leagues instead of college as the primary feeder and development system.
Baseball was a game ideally suited to radio - hence the proliferation of games that used to be played in the weekday daytime (before stadium lights were a fixture, so to speak), but people could listen to the game at work. Football is more of a TV game. Football was the lesser sport until TV came along.
Look at hockey, the quintessentially Canadian game with a lot less US interest. The farm teams and development teams are not part of colleges. In fact, many very good players dropped out at 14 to do hockey, they could join the pros at 18, and the image of a hockey player when I was growing up was the opposite of smart. (Much like US football scholars today).
History. What I am about to say is only a crude approximation and I am sure you can find complete histories elsewhere.
Colleges had and still have intramural sports of all kinds. I assume this is true all over. When I spent a year at the University of Fribourg (Swiss) I played in a math dept. basketball game that involved both staff and students. Then one day in the 19th century, two schools decided to play their best intramural football teams against each other. Here this first intercollegiate game is reputed to have been between Harvard and McGill. After that, such games became more and more common and schools started taking the results seriously. I don’t know when and where athletic “scholarships” started. I would conjecture the Midwest with the Big Ten. I do know that some time in the 1930s, U. Chicago got out of the Big Ten and was replaced by Northwestern. This madness continued on the west coast and the south, not the east was immune. A few years ago the Big Ten expanded, adding Penn State (but they are still called the Big Ten) and I believe they are planning to add more colleges. By the early 1950s, U. Penna. was playing a national schedule including teams like U. Cal, Notre Dame, Army, and Navy. Then in 1953, Penn and seven other eastern Institutions formed the “Ivy League” with deemphasis on sports, serious academic requirements for “student-athletes” and a limit–but not the end–on athletic scholarships. Penn (my school) lost 31 consecutive games as they played their national schedule with an Ivy League team. The schedules were made at least three years in advance. So, while the Ivy League is quasi-sane, the rest of the country is, frankly, nuts. The leading football and basketball coaches make several millions.
In Canada the situation is different. Universities do have formal teams that play a regional schedule and there are playoffs between the different regional leagues and, eventually, a national championship. But it is all low-key, nobody makes much of it. The year that McGill won the national football championship, the student daily did not so much as mention it. I paid close attention because I was curious how the editors (who had engineered a kind of left wing takeover of the papers) would play the victory. They just ignored it.
I don’t know how it is in the rest of Canada, but there are no inter-school leagues at the HS level. When I was in HS in Philly, there was a public HS league and a Catholic HS and the winners of each played each other for the city titles (only in football and basketball, IIRC) but it was still very low-key. But I know that in other parts of the US, HS sports are huge too.
As a non-American, the US interest in high school and university sports does seem strange. I mean, I understand watching a game if your child is playing in it, but the concept of going, as an adult, to watch a football match between two high schools strikes me as odd.
I mean, I really couldn’t care less about my old high school’s First XV or First XI and most people I know feel the same way - even a couple who went to really posh private schools.
(You’ll have to click on each of the categories listed in the article to find lists of them.)
In 1835, there were only two universities in all of England and Wales - Oxford and Cambridge. It was a little better in Scotland, which (despite the smaller population) had four universities. Ireland, then still in the U.K., had one university. It was only after that point that newer universities began being formed. I don’t know the number of universities in the U.S. in 1835, but it was already probably over a hundred. Even now, there are apparently less than 150 universities in the U.K., while there are something like four thousand universities in the U.S. The U.K. was slower than France and Germany and apparently various other countries in Europe in increasing the number of universities. This is why Germany was considered the center for academia between the mid-nineteenth century and the early twentieth century.
The idea of the “local university” caught on earlier in the U.S. than in the U.K. (if it’s ever caught on in the U.K.). The big university for your state might be a hundred miles from you, and you might never consider going to college, but their teams were still the ones you cheered for. Football and later basketball started being played in high schools and colleges and only later were thought of as professional sports. Baseball developed as non-academic local teams for everyone and then as professional teams. Hockey developed the same way as baseball in Canada. Even today, although most of the professional hockey teams in North America are in the U.S., most of the players are Canadian. (There’s been a recent trend for all four North American big team sports to import players from outside North America.)
Oxford University probably dates back to the 1100’s, or perhaps even a bit earlier, and Cambridge to the 1200s. Some of the Scottish Universities go well back into the middle ages too. However, the vast majority of universities in both Britain and America (and, indeed, elsewhere) have been founded since the mid-nineteenth century. (The main exceptions to that were the German Universities which led the way from the early 18th century.) Furthermore, the older American colleges such as Harvard and Princeton were small institutions of little intellectual distinction until the major expansion and upgrading of American higher education in the wake of the civil war. The leader in this was not any of the (relatively) old, and, at his point, still undistinguished, “ivy league” colleges, but Johns Hopkins, founded in 1876 as America’s first true research university, following the German model. This triggered a very rapid expansion and upgrading of the system during the last couple of decades of the 19th century, and the early 20th, during which the ivy league colleges also greatly raised their game.
Before the very late 19th century, if an American wanted to get a worthwhile graduate-level education they had no real choice but to go abroad, usually to Germany, and many did, even well into the 20th century. The new and expanded American universities of the late 19th century were staffed mostly by German educated Americans, plus a few British educated ones and a few imported actual Germans and Brits. By this time many of them were truly intellectually dynamic places, already beginning to rival the Europeans in a few areas (although they did not become the ‘best in the world’ until a good a deal later, their continuing rise essentially paralleling America’s rise to military and economic superpower status).
However, none of this, I am afraid, tells us much about why sport has such a stranglehold on so many U.S. universities these days. American universities do remain the best in the world, in most respects, but there are many reasons to be concerned over whether they will be able to hold onto that status for very much longer.
The Boat Race between Oxford and Cambridge dates back almost 200 years. The Duke of Wellington attended Eton in the late eighteenth century and, after the Battle of Waterloo, suggested a connection between the value of sports and the victory against Napoleon. One of the requirements for the Rhodes Scholarships, established in 1902, was success in sports. So I don’t think the US is unique in associating sports and scholarship.
With the number of universities in America they have to find a way to distinguish themselves. Sports is one way to do that. Succeeding in sports is a way to attract more students. A study has found that having a good year in basketball or football can attract 10% more applications than a previous year.
Schools with succesful football teams also have more alumni giving, better quality applicants, and a better academic reputation.
Given that the US has by far the best university system in the world and the most sports friendly it would make sense for other countries to copy the US and not the other way around.
Rugby football, similar in that it’s played with an oval ball,to American football, but much rougher and without any of the ridiculous protective gear, was invented at Rugby - a ‘public’ school - in 1823 (according to popular tradition). Boys from Rugby would almost always go on to Oxford or Cambridge.
The entirely amature game grew in popularity, both among the upper class university types, and the working class men, mainly in the North of the country until the 1890s when it split into Rugby Union, the amature game - essentially playe by universities, and Rugby League, the professional one, played by workers supported by their employers.
It was only 20 years ago that the amature Union decided to end the sham of ‘allowances’ and admit to paying players. This decision may well spell the end of the League.
We had a couple of exchange students that played for our high school’s soccer team. Also, they loved going to the football games, even though they had no idea what was going on. High school athletics was new to them but they greatly appreciated it.
Another thing, ever notice where all the PGA players (foreign and American) go to school? In the US.
It’s more than you make it sound. I suspect probably 5-10% of the population would be fine with dropping sports. Probably a similar number would be neutral towards it. But a solid majority are in favor of college and HS sports.
What are the options for talented young basketball players, football players and baseball players who are absolutely and positively not interested in academics, not even underwater basket weaving, and who just want to get their professional playing careers started on the highest level as soon as possible?
The OP mentioned that soccer leagues in the UK have an industrial origin. I think this is a case where it is hard for a UKer to really understand how huge and spread out most of the US is.
With a few exceptions, Most of the big football schools are in the Midwestern farm states or rural south where there is not now, and basically never has been, any significant industrial economy. These are agricultural states, there are no industrial magnates in Nebraska or Oklahoma to create a working mans league. Just miles and miles and miles of corn farming with a couple universities plunked down in the middle of it all.
In addition, most of these universities are located away from urban centers. The university is a source if “shit to do” and one of those things is watch sports, when the nearest professional team is hundreds of miles away (or there isn’t one in that state). Nebraska is 77,000 square miles ( considerably bigger than England) and doesn’t have even 1 NFL football team; By contrast, there’s 20 premier league teams in England.
With regards to American football… it originated in college as a hybrid of rugby, and was played only by colleges and didn’t become established as a professional game until the 1920’s. And it wasn’t until the 1950’s that it started to become popular. So it probably followed that college players then went on to become professional players.
American professional is really comparably young. Roone Arledge created Monday Night Football in the early 1970’s and the program is credited with having a major influence on the increasing popularity of the game. Television revenues became so lucrative that it was only natural that college players become pros because they could earn millions.