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Notes -
I've been feeling increasingly similar to some of the points expressed in this post with American Football, at least at the collegiate and high school levels, though admittedly less in high school. Originally the game was our collegiate students vs the other teams collegiate students - most of which were if not local, regionally close to the colleges playing. You'd also play the regional teams: Michigan vs Ohio State. Oklahoma vs Texas. Army vs Navy. While football (and other sports) have long left the original realms of student who were athletes, becoming athletes who we pretend are students, and recently it has become even more mercenary with the Name Image Likeness (NIL) deals and portal transfers. Roster turnovers year to year are getting insane. Your arch nemesis' star player is now your star player because some booster offered $2 million more to them.
Now when I follow my alma mater, I couldn't tell you half the players year to year due to all the transfers that happen. When I was growing up, you'd get excited knowing how your team's players would become better with each year on the team, but also the influx of talent coming in as freshmen. The old timers would do me one better by seeing most of the kids grow up into playing at high schools in the area, then going to their local college to play for the alma mater. Each step back in history is more true to the distillation of local pride of "your kids" vs "their kids". Now it is "our money" vs "their money".
Hard to feel pride when the alma mater does well or disappointment when they fail - when there is nothing that the local area did to help raise the kids who are doing well - just a handful of rich boosters paying the best players around the country to win a game. But without the substance for why your team won the game with your kids, it is just a further deracination from the spirit which created the game in the first place.
(and yes I know football was "invented" by Rutgers because they got whipped in baseball by Princeton)
I think the awkward collision here is that college sports are almost explicitly identarian in nature in a way that few other sports are. At least traditionally, you have a certain style of play, a famous coach, you keep players for a few years, you get to see them grow and develop and flourish, and then (again traditionally) often never even had to see them show up at a rival school, because they'd either age out or "graduate" to the pro leagues. All on top of the inherent local nature of many state colleges, which is statistically quite strong, and then you also have personal connections in the alumni base which simply isn't present in pro sports (you occasionally get a "native son" or daughter who is praised to know end but this isn't actually all that common). So yeah, the NIL/transfer era is truly tragic, almost everyone is feeling this way. I say this doubly so as a college basketball fan, where you are almost extra aware of the players since teams are so small.
The upshot is that college sports had something to lose, and find themselves in a weird spot where no one's sure how much to care about representation. Nowhere is this more visible in my personal opinion than my own alma mater, BYU! Not only is there a strong cultural component, there's also the desire to have the athletes represent the values, which is still strong but at least slightly in conflict with a desire to win as still relative newcomers in the high-profile Big 12 conference, plus the desire for good PR for the underlying church. I think they are threading the needle slightly better than most, but there's no denying that things are decidedly strange.
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