> College athletics is a pretty good system for promoting lesser-followed sports that would have difficulty maintaining an organized league -- team volleyball,

> College athletics is a pretty good system for promoting lesser-followed sports that would have difficulty maintaining an organized league -- team volleyball, swimming, field hockey, rowing, etc -- because it provides infrastructure and funding that would unlikely be available if reliant on revenue. And yet, outside of the USA, these sports do manage to exist, leagues and all, outside universities.