if some VHS tapes are so good it doesn't depend from the source but from the way it is recorded.
A clean, nice signal recorded on a professional VHS system will give an excellent tape.
As the electronic of the VHS is limiting the signal to the bare minimum recordable, you can take any signal higher than this limit, it will show no difference.
what is often missed with DV is the poor chrominance signal that is hidden behind the luminance signal.
When you record DV to vhs, the luminance signal is decreased, so the poor chrominance quality shows up.
Conclusion: DV is not a clean and nice signal, it is partially based on an illusion (correct assumption that your brain is less detail sensitive for colors than for luminance).
A medium 4:2:2 analog signal will give better result even if it looked bad compared to a 4:2:0 (or 4:1:1) DV signal.
Some signal issued by good old hi8mm are better than DV, the problem is that the tape is not able to record and replay such quality.

By the way, the JVC cam for football is a bad idea, since progressive video at 30p is not the best for fast movement, neither the mpeg-ts encoding used.
You will get probably a better result with a 3ccd camera, and even better if it is 16:9 capable (few models currently)

Thanks for that observation. I knew I wasn't totally crazy!