Its the same here in Kansas city. Unless the KC Chiefs are having a banner year they have to compete with KU, MU, and Nebraska for football fans.
Important to understand: collegiate football and collegiate basketball were popular spectator sports years BEFORE there were any professional teams or leagues. Princeton and Rutgers played the first college football game in 1869. The NFL didn’t exist until 1920. College basketball began in 1891, while the NBA wasn’t established until 1947.
Professional football and basketball teams were created to capitalize on the immense popularity of collegiate sports!
It appears that our schools began their athletic traditions about the same time as athletic clubs were forming in England and that here in the U.S. the schools just beat the clubs to the punch. They both seem to fill the same basic function within a community.
Most sports, or most sports which pull in thousands of fans? There are many smaller sports and teams in colleges which have neither highly paid coaches or scholarships.
Two factors. Lack of competing professional or college sports teams, as mentioned, and a large number of high school alumni still living in the area and so still attached to the school.
Hence “Friday Night Lights”. I’ve been to Texas only a couple of times in my life (and never for very long) but I’ve heard that during football season entire towns (as long as they’re not TOO big, I’m guessing) shut down on Friday nights because EVERYone is at the high school football game. Now THAT is dedication!
Not entirely true, though you need to go back quite a ways.
The Cleveland Browns absolutely dominated the AAFC (a short-lived rival to the NFL) in the late 1940s. They were then one of the AAFC teams which was brought into the NFL in 1950, at which point, they went out and won the NFL title in their first year in the league. From 1950 through 1965, the Browns went to the NFL Championship game nine times, and won four titles.
As you say, this is very much the case in small towns of Texas. Face it- there isn’t that much else to do on a Friday night in many rural Texas towns!
Here in Austin, there are some excellent high school football teams (Westlake has won or contended for the state title several times), but they don’t draw huge crowds because kids have a lot more entertainment options.
Don’t forget that in small-town America, you may not just be rooting for your local HS football team, but the kid that mows your lawn every week (starting quarterback), the neighbor’s twin boys (left and right defensive tackles), your pastor’s son, your cousin’s daughter (cheerleader)…
It’s about the community and the folks you know in it.
OMG, a Browns fan. I thought you guys were extinct!
Well, to be fair, since that time the Browns have come within one win of the Super Bowl a number of times (1968, 1969, 1986, 1987, and 1989) but you’re right - for the most part the Browns’ greatest success can be measured in terms of being DECADES ago, not just years.
If anybody is really interested in seeing what small town dedication is to their high school teams, you should watch the movie “Hoosiers”. It’s a fictionalized account of a real high school team that won the Indiana state basketball title for all comers from an extremely small school in the early 1950s. The dedication of the townspeople to their team is pretty realistic.
Why would supporting the guy that lives next door to me be all that different from supporting the kid down the street?
Just in my walks around my neighborhood I easily see a half-dozen or more signs in yards announcing that their kid is a member of some supportable/attendable activity–a sports team, a cheerleader, band member, whatever.
The total number of available scholarships per year outside of football and mens basketball is 119,000. Football has 30,000 scholarships available and Men’s basketball has 28,000 scholarships. Many of the scholarships in smaller sports are not full scholarships but are divied up amoung 3 or 4 people.
To the more general question of “How did college football become a big deal in the first place,” I’ve heard some historians say that the end of the Civil War was a big part of the reason. A lot of America’s elites believed that the Civil War had been a great character building exercise for the young men who served in it, and worried that young college men who wouldn’t have to go to war would become “soft” and unmanly as a result.
Football was seen in many circles as a perfect substitute for war, and a way to build tough, manly men.
According to this theory, old, antiquated football cheers like “Sis Boom Bah” were originally intended to replicate the sounds of a battlefield. Either that or the sound of an exploding sheep.
It pains me to agree with a Stanford fan (Go Bears!) but this is precisely true. It’s a false dichotomy, proposed earlier in this thread, that there is some sort of trade-off between academic excellence and college sports. Stanford was an excellent school when its football team sucked. It’s an excellent school now that it’s football team is good. It would be an excellent school if it cancelled inter-collegiate sports altogether.
And the above is true for Berkeley (aka Cal), University of Texas, Michigan, Wisconsin, North Carolina, UCLA, USC…
And in general: Exapno Mapcase has covered this ground succinctly and accurately. So to answer the OP: just read his responses. 
Are these schools where the athletes actually are students? That’s why Stanford was mentioned.
Yes. Real schools with real student athletes. Even Michigan which I was born to despise.
This opinion piece addresses the ongoing mess in collegiate athletics concerning amateurism (which I agree is totally messed up), but it also includes a history that addresses the OP’s question.
Real schools with ***some ***real student athletes. Let’s not pretend that all those schools aren’t bending the rules at times. Perhaps often.