In more than 20 years I’ve spent studying the issue, I have yet to hear a convincing argument that college football has anything do with what is presumably the primary purpose of higher education: academics.
The public does not need to be convinced that there is something in mathematics.
The same evidence that is convincing to one person may not convince another.
With truths of a certain kind, it is not enough to make them appear convincing: one must also make them felt. Of such kind are moral truths.
Life is always going to be stranger than fiction, because fiction has to be convincing, and life doesn’t.