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As someone not from the US, the whole role of sports in college/universities seems so... weird.

Mixing institutions with an education and research purpose with sport tribalism seems like a terrible idea to begin with, adding tons of money to the mix surely can't result in anything that has anything to do with education...

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As you elude to, I think it speaks to a bigger problem which is that Universities don't really know what they want to be or what their main purposes are. Are they places of learning for the sake of learning and scholarship? Are they job training and placement centers? Are they social clubs and camps for young adults? Are they sports franchises? Are they centers of basic research? Are they centers of collaborative industrial research? Are they incubators for companies? Are they political entities that want to shape public policy? Are they centers of social justice? They seem to want to be all things to all people but that's not possible when pursuing mission A inherently puts them in conflict with mission B.

I have nothing against of schools having clubs doing sports. Even marginally supported by funds from students for things like travel and gear.

But the level of strange commercialisation is just different from rest of the world. Insane amounts of money spend and revenues generated, but nothing really end up at athletes.

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