I feel like this is troublingly likely.

Fun (USian) football fact: In the early twentieth century when stanford university was eyeballs deep in putting eugenics into practice, they were essentially trying to apply horse breeding principles to humans. Leland Stanford was a big time race horse pedigree guy and thought he could engineer basically the same kind of "breeding standards" with humans. That is where the notion of IQ was born, but they went a lot further. How to breed a better soldier? Well for that you need another eugenicist metrics. Sports statistics tracking and specifically college football became the testbed for the physical side of eugenics.