Originally posted by: Kevin Lewis
Suspect all you want. Why do you care, unless you want to make some stupid point?
You can look up, if you want, whether college football teams usually make or lose money. You'll find that they almost always lose money, and I'm talking about football teams exclusive of the athletic departments as a whole. It's certainly true that they bring in revenues, but those aren't enough to pay for the often massive expenses the teams rack up--aside from coaches' salaries, upkeep of stadiums, etc. etc.
Alumni donations don't enter into it because you can't say that those donations are made exclusively because of the football team. Also, alumni donations could be channeled to other purposes rather than being soaked up by the football team's shortfall.
I researched the exact situation you describe. I obtained the budgets for the athletic department and for each program. There was no program that returned positive net revenue. The men's and women's basketball, baseball/softball, track, etc. etc. etc. teams--they all lost money. But the football team dwarfed all others in net revenue loss, even though it also dwarfed all others in gross revenue. Its expenses, including the million-dollar coach, were huge.
I spent 20+ hours researching and writing this for my article. You can believe me or not. I don't give a shit either way.
Kevin, apparently you should have spent 30 hours researching.
