Despite the common beliefs, the vast majority of universities lose money on college sports. There are lots of sports options at universities. Women have more sports teams than men on average. Most schools don’t have teams for all of the possible NCAA sports. Big losers include wrestling, tennis, rifle, gymnastics and sking.
There’s a standard narrative fueling the big business of college football. Many of its advocates put it like this: football programs generate so much revenue for the university, while also supporting “non-revenue” sports like golf and swimming from its own budgetary excess, that college football is its own justification for the large team budgets and coaches’ salaries. Because alumni are much more generous during years when football teams win, academic programming benefits as well. Indeed, so this standard narrative goes, both the jump in admissions applications and the wider “public relations” effect that accompanies a football program cause munificent ripples throughout a university’s stream of income. Many even maintain that football helps to subsidize the obscure and non-remunerative activities of colleges—research into the reproductive biology of ducks and eighteenth-century German poetry, for example. Without a football program, scholarship money would plummet and applicants would flock elsewhere in search of universities with better “student life” opportunities. Read more here.