The criticism is more that the money on football doesn’t show up in test scores, not that it harms test scores, and the believe that their tax dollars would be better spent on something that does contribute to test scores. (Reasonable people can disagree about that)

Texans scored highly on Texas state tests, but generally below the national average on national tests like the SAT https://legacyonlineschool.com/blog/texas-sat-score.html I don’t think Texas can be used to make the arguments either way here.

The NAEP scores cited in my link above are nationally standardized tests from the federal department of education: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Assessment_of_Educati.... SAT scores are hard to compare across states because they are optional and states have different participation rates.

The steel man version of what you’re saying is that American kids do really well on tests, accounting for factors like the large immigrant population. And they choose to invest their significantly greater financial resources in sports rather than improving score even further. Which is a fair argument!

But the formulation of the argument made by OP is just cultural chauvinism. Being culturally open minded has little to do with reading and math scores. Utah performs similarly to states like Minnesota in reading scores, and better than almost any other state in math.