This study focuses on the inheritance of traditional sports culture in physical education in colleges and universities, which is relatively weak in colleges and universities despite its rich connotation and national characteristics. The article adopts the back propagation algorithm in deep learning to shorten the distance between students and traditional sports culture and improve the inheritance effect. The inheritance critical value of traditional sports culture was calculated by exploring the inheritance effect of traditional sports culture from the three dimensions of cognition, emotion, and behavior, and combining the threshold value of information dissemination. The study further analyzed the inheritance value demand of different programs in colleges and universities based on students’ cognition of each traditional sports program. By comparing the inheritance scores of 20 colleges and universities, it reveals the differences in the effectiveness of different types of colleges and universities in the inheritance of traditional sports culture. The results show that students have the highest awareness of dragon boat as an item (0.6519), while the mean variance of betting plus and crossbow shooting are 47.245 and 17.862, respectively, indicating their importance in the inheritance needs of traditional sports programs in colleges and universities. Among the 20 studied universities, the 4th school had the highest classic sports culture inheritance effect score of 0.54. The study’s findings provide valuable data support and strategy suggestions for optimizing and enhancing the inheritance of traditional sports culture in universities.