This is one of those questions for which I’ve heard ‘evidence’ supporting both sides: are college athletics self-sufficient (in other words, they make enough money in men’s football, basketball, hockey, to pay for all the other less commercial sports, and the salaries, renovations, etc…) or do they actually end up costing the greater university money? Does the money they bring in stay in the athletic program, or is it used in the university? I go to Wisconsin (and I should probably already know the answer to my own question) and it burns to see 20 sections of introductory Spanish get cut while the stadium is getting a spiffy new giganto-scoreboard.
Depends.
The University of Florida turns a profit on any number of sports, and has excellent facilities in place for most of them. Not having to build new facilities + a huge (merchandise-buying) fan base + lucrative conference TV contracts = a profitable athletic program.
The University of Central Florida, on the other hand, has a loss-leading athletic program. Since we’re really good at sports nobody watches (national collegiate cheerleading champs last year, for example) and until now have played all sports except football in the Atlantic Sun Conference (read: The “We get onto ESPN 2 twice a year” Conference), and have been building facilities commensurate with what has become the nation’s 8th largest student body (63rd when I enrolled), academics and the state have been subsidising our athletic programs.
Once you get into a big enough conference (ie. Conference USA, in which UCF will play all sports starting in 2005), TV revenue suddenly makes things very, very different.
While all of this is just stuff I’ve heard and read but do not recall exactly where, most university atheltic programs do not make enough to be self-sufficient—that is, they have to tap into university funds to keep things going. The University of Oregon (which is where I’m in school) is one of the few in the nation (or at least that’s what they say) that has an athletic department that operates without using university funds that would otherwise go to funding academics, and they pride themselves on that.