University sports. Whether you love them or hate them, they can be pretty formative to many people’s university experience, galvanising the student body around a common rival and turning Wednesday nights into a club bouncer’s worst nightmare. From the serious to the slightly less so, BUCS Wednesdays send student athletes across the country to compete in everything from archery to water polo. Some of these matches really can become spectacles, with public school favourites such as rugby and cricket often bringing in North Face puffers and chinos galore from all corners of campus. Despite this, university sports in the UK are objectively amateur and more than a bit silly. As a student at the University of Cambridge, I have been lucky to observe my university at the pinnacle of British university sports in events such as the Varsity Matches and the Boat Race, but even these traditional highlights of the sporting calendar seem pretty grass roots compared to college sports across the pond in the US.  

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They say everything is bigger in America, that is rarely more evident than in sports, 8 of the 10 largest stadiums in the world are in the US and they are all home to college American Football teams. Our American cousins might just be right when they say that the European mind truly cannot comprehend a squad of 18- to 22-year-old amateurs marching out in front of six-figure crowds. Some college powerhouses such as the University of Alabama, the University of Texas in Austin, and Pennsylvania State University attract far bigger and feverish support than a lot of professional NFL teams. But why is this? The product on the field is certainly not better at the college level, after all these are not full-time professional athletes rather teenagers balancing school work and training.  

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To understand the college football craze in the US we must first look back. The modern-day college sports tradition started with the expansion of state funded higher education institutions in the US during the late 1800s and early 1900s. Previously university athletics had been restricted to the highly exclusive Ivy League (whose name comes from the inter collegiate sports league). These state universities opened their doors to far bigger cohorts than the private institutes, originally focusing on more practical subjects such as agriculture and engineering.

 

Another defining feature of these schools was their often far more rural campuses when compared to the cramped Ivy League schools surrounding New York and Boston. The large student bodies would be left restless without any major metropolitan hubs nearby resulting in great interest in the university sports teams. Local leagues quickly formed pushing neighbourly rivalries. College derbies are fierce and garner national attention, games such as Michigan State vs Ohio State or Alabama vs Texas at Austin take up prime time television slots and attract tens of millions of viewers. To truly help you understand the magnitude of these college teams we can look at Washington State University whose home field has a capacity of 35,117. The stadium is situated in the town of Pullman which in 2022 had a population of 32,508. The local university football ground can fit the entire town in with room to spare, and it does get filled, week in and week out.  

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On game day, each university offers a wealth of colourful and unique traditions, an army of adoring fans, and some good old American pageantry. But this is being prayed on in a rather interesting way. The National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) is the governing body of all university sports in the US. Since its founding in 1906, it has gained an infamous reputation for mistreatment and exploitation of athletes as a result of its policies regarding player compensation. Starting as a seemingly noble attempt to keep collegiate sporting competitions away from the bureaucracy and complication of professionalisation, the NCAA states that players cannot be in any way

compensated for their athletic performance whilst at university. This hoped to ensure that richer schools could not essentially bribe players into joining their programs maintaining parity across schools. These rules were very much of their time, but times have changed, billions have been injected into college sports in the form of endorsements, television rights and sports betting, and yet the star athletes who draw in crowds of 100,000 people into stadiums and millions on their TVs would not receive anything. The result of these strict set of rules is decades of scandals and under the table deals by universities to try and entice athletes to their school.

 

Many have tried to find non-financial ways around these rules infamously resulting in athletes losing academic scholarships for accepting lifts from coaching staff, free furniture for their dormitory rooms and even free copies of video games that featured them. It was one of the worst kept secrets in all American sports that powerhouse universities had all sorts of secret deals with student athletes who would start arriving to training sessions in supercars.  

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This all changed in 2021 when the Supreme Court of the United States convened to discuss the case of the NCAA vs Shawne Alston. This was another attempt in a long list for athletes to be granted compensation for the use of their Name, Image, and Likeness (NIL) by NCAA affiliated universities. In a landmark decision the courts sided with the athletes granting them compensation in the form of NIL deals. Some of these deals are well into the seven figures and have caused a monumental shift in the operation of these lucrative university teams. A lot of the dealings that had previously taken place in the shadows were now completely legal, and this only made things crazier. Players began transferring universities at an unprecedented rate and teams got up and left leagues that they had been a part of for decades in an attempt to gain more television deals to keep up with bloated NIL spending. The current landscape has been described as a wild west, free for all with players moving schools and negotiating new contracts daily. 

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University sport in America brings in millions of spectators a year, support entire economies of local areas, fuel a billion-dollar broadcasting and gambling industry and have even been taken to the Supreme Court on multiple occasions. The sky-high stakes and adrenaline of it all is so distinctly American. But if you ask me, I will still take a waterlogged pitch followed by Wednesday Revs any day.