Nearly All US Universities Lose Money on Sports

This is a weekly football column, most of which is about the topic in question, when you get to the words "Brett Favre" you can stop reading. Do follow the links, though, the USA Today one is especially damning.

Theses statistics come up several times a year, and they are always misleading. It's Hard to measure how much money a University makes on sports teams. I go to a school that has a BCS football program that makes more money then it spends (objectively, spent ~18 million last year and made ~23 million). I don't know about the athletic program at large. But beyond that $23M in revenue directly from the football program, there are some other revenue sources that are hard to measure.

Schools like UT make a whole lot of their money off of alumni donating directly to the program. When UT lost their head coach, on of the alumni flew in several potential candidates for the position on his private jet. How do you measure that in revenue?

Further, I would not have gone to the school I chose if it weren't for the football program. Season tickets, even in the nosebleeds, for a team that has won its conference more often then not in the past 5 years, has way more value to me then the ~$300 that I pay. That definitely reflected in my decision to go here, and I probably would have gone somewhere else otherwise. So we can claim at least ~$30k per year to my school for their athletic program.

Also, depending on what they include in the athletic program, it can be even more involved. Would you have gone to a school with no intramural programs? What about if they had no gym? Maybe a lot of people would have, but the majority would not.

So why are student clubs being giving an effectively unlimited budget out of proportion with the number of members?

At all the universities in my country, student clubs (whether they are about sport, non-sport competitive activities, interests and hobbies, or even 'drinking clubs') get paid by the student association (which has a finite budget to provide services to students) based on the number of students in the club. Student sports clubs are unlikely to be able to afford any full-time staff - but that isn't really necessary when there are plenty of club members willing to volunteer.

I have to wonder how any university could not have at least some limits on how much university money clubs could spend per member.

One of the big reasons Universities compete in sports is to attract alumni donors. If you just look at it at a micro level, the direct expense on sports is probably more than the revenue from sports. But if you factor in alumni donations, then I've heard that the benefits far outweigh the costs.

I was in a Division II school, and they made a big push to get into Division I. And the main reason they gave was to get alumni involvement in the school.

Oklahoma pays it's own way. In fact, it gives nearly $1 MM to the general scholarship fund annually.

Of course, the only citation I can offer is being a former student athlete, and having my support staff, coaches, and university executives repeat the statistic on the record like, well, a broken record. I haven't seen the line items though myself -- I wasn't on the student liaison committee.