Your source says "athletic departments", not football or basketball programs, which is an important distinction. Football and basketball are the only money-makers (I think hockey or baseball make money at a few schools), and all of the other sports drag down the athletic departments budget.

That's also ignoring that FBS is basically advertising. There's been a steady increase in applications (and subsequently an increase in average GPA and similar numbers) at University of Alabama under Nick Saban, and I know I would have been less likely to go to Virginia Tech if it wasn't for their football program drawing me in when I was in middle/high school.

A couple of other examples:

Jim Calhoun and Geno Auriemma did more to take the University of Connecticut to national prominence than 100 deans. And Auriemma did it by excellence in a non-revenue sport.

While Mark Few at Gonzaga made the NCAA tournament 20 years in a row, this small Jesuit school in Spokane doubled the number of applicants, increased the proportion of students from outside Washington, increased incoming student test scores and dramatically grew the endowment.

Slightly off-topic, but the recent performance of VT's football program has been depressing. I'd hate to see things sway over to UVlame. :(

Boston College received triple their number of average applications the year after Doug Flutie threw his Hail Mary.

I didn't realize that. Do you have a source for this, please?

It depends on the school which means maybe some schools should not have sports teams? How crazy is it to think that a school should be focused on education and not go into debt to finance extracurriculars.

Big brand name schools that are regularly competing at top level in sports are usually seeing huge financial surplus due to sports.

This article is a few years old, but I don't think the situation has changed radically.

http://www.ncaa.org/about/resources/media-center/news/athlet...

Big sports inside universities are usually structured as a separate corporation for maximum tax effect.