American Obsession with College Football - What explains?

Americans - Please help this European make sense of the many contradictions that I witness daily in your country. I ask as an ignorant imbecile who is seeking to further his understanding of your great country. Some examples How is it that the richest country in the world has such high levels of poverty and homelessness? America spends the most on healthcare on a per capita basis, yet achieves some of the worst outcomes - lower average life spans than Europeans, worse health care outcomes, raging opioid crisis etc How so? Highest defense spending on the military and police, yet the streets are riddled with death, crime and gun violence? All this brings me to my main gripe (yes, I am serious), the American obsession with college football. I have been to a few games and I find many students who attend the game to not be interested in the game per se. Most are there just to have a good time and "be seen". Also, until I came to the states, I had never heard of programs such as Alabama, Clemson, LSU which seem to have cult status/following in America or at least in certain parts of the country. These schools don't produce any cutting edge research or Nobel winners, and are only known because of their football prowess. Bizarre! I was stunned to learn that in Texas, the highest paid government employee is the football coach from the University of Texas. A lot of the students who play college football spend minimal time on their studies and are barely employable once they graduate with degrees in "made up" subjects. I understand the role sports play in students receiving a well rounded education, but the sheer amount of money (with high paying coaches, expensive stadiums & fancy gyms) spent on football teams is hard to fathom even if you account for the revenue made from ticket sales and television rights. Wouldn't it be better if that money (efficient capital allocation) was spent on research & development in areas such as ML/AI/robotics where the US and the rest of the Western world is furiously competing with China, Korea, Japan and India? Lastly, I find it hard to get behind college football knowing that there is a version of the game (NFL) that is played at a much higher/superior level by trained athletes/professionals. In most of EU and other OECD nations, the purpose of college is first and foremost on education. One gets the feeling that in a lot of these football focused schools, education is a distant second. I know that this a bit of a generalization as there are many highly ranked US schools (Caltech, Carnegie Mellon, Johns Hopkins etc) that produce tons of research and foster innovation and entrepreneurship and should not be clubbed with the football schools. Edit: TC 515k