College football acts as a filter

My final week of travel through the US has again brought me into contact with the staggering scale of university sport in this country.

Some mindblowing numbers illustrate this. For example: $3.8-million, or R42-million, that's the average salary of university head coaches in the top American football division, the SEC.

The highest-paid coach, Nick Saban, of thetop-ranked team, Alabama, will earn $7.2-million, or R79-million, this year.

Perhaps most staggering, the revenue of Texas University last year was $166-million (R1.8-billion), which includes $61-million (R668-million) in ticket sales, courtesy of a stadium that seats 101000 and is regularly sold out. Theirs is one of eight university stadiums with a capacity greater than 100000.

By comparison, the SA Rugby Union reported annual revenue of R795-million in 2013 - less than half the amount of a single US university's revenue.

There are 38 universities with annual revenues greater than Saru's, which provides some context to this enormously lucrative market.

Expenses are equally obscene.

Each division one college is allowed to award 85 football scholarships, some valued at $250000.

Facilities are state-of-the-art, teams fly in private jets, and huge sums are thrown into recruiting programmes to identify and attract the top high school talent to a college.

One college spent $1-million sending its marching band around the country to play at matches.

It's a surreal world is commercialism in sport, but I bring it up to illustrate its primary purpose of fulfilling Darwin's "survival of the fittest" concept in sport, by filtering thousands of hopefuls into the elite few who create successful professional careers.

This also has implications for South African rugby.

Our Varsity Cup is modelled on the US college system, but differs in two key respects. The first is the obvious commercial value, mentioned above.

The second, more important, difference is that the college system in the US is the primary pathway to professional sport.

It's not quite the only way - the very rare athlete succeeds without going to a major college - but if the pathway to professional sport in the US is a super highway, then colleges provide the vehicles to get there.

In South Africa, the Varsity Cup is not Route One, but an alternative pathway, created to complement the typical progression from school to professional contract or academy, and then on to Currie Cup, Super rugby and Springbok success.

This alternative is crucial, because the transition to adulthood is a key watershed, where talented young athletes are lost. When players aged 18 are scouted the risks of identifying the wrong player or failing to pick the right one are substantial.

The same happens in the US. The country is full of great athletes who excelled in college but weren't quite good enough to make the 256 players drafted into the NFL each year.

Their system is so enormous, however, that this "wastage" is accepted - it's not difficult to fill spots on 32 teams when you have 25000 players at the highest level of college football, and the odd failure is barely noticed.

However, South Africa can't afford this wastage, especially because we don't yet have central contracts.

Our competitive provincial system compels professional teams to place inherently inefficient bets on a few talented schoolboys. So, we absolutely have to give the non-selected players every chance to remain "viable", which is to say, keep the doorways open for as long as possible before they are shut.

The Varsity Cup rejuvenated the viability pathway more than the Vodacom Cup was able to.

The danger, however, is that the Varsity Cup will simply creep slowly into a rebranded version of the Vodacom Cup, filled with spillover players from the school system.

If this happens, then all it means is that professional teams are placing more bets, equally inefficient, and the whole advantage is lost. For this reason, it's essential that the integrity of Varsity Cup as a true student competition be defended.

We can't compete with the dollars of the US college system, but we can show more sense and use the Varsity Cup more effectively, to advance our own sport.