I said before that sports making money is not the issue. The college experience should be about academics with athletics playing a supporting role. I believe that a diversity of sport and other pursuits is a positive for campus life. Some folks are basing their entire argument from the $ position. If you accept that that is paramount, then you really need to do a further examination. First, given the financial and other resources available, could you make more money doing something else? If so, then you should do that something else. Second, you need to do a true cost accounting. I say this because budgets are often not what they seem. It is easy to make something look profitable when it's not. A couple of quick examples. You build a football stadium. Is that credited against athletic monies? It's an easy matter to place it under capital expenditures/campus improvements. What about the janitors and caretakers of said stadium? Their salaries and equipment costs come under the physical plant budget, not the athletic budget. I remember talking to a co-worker a few years back about this sort of thing (a retired Air Force Lt. Colonel who was as much a football fan as any). At the time, I was under the belief that football was a money maker for most large schools. He had just read a study that took into account the sort of budgetary variables I just mentioned and had concluded that very few schools really do make money. (There were the obvious ones such as Notre Dame.) When it came to smaller schools, true costs exceeded revenues.
But again I assert that money is not king here. I think it would be nice if sports could pay for themselves via ticket sales and alumni donations, but how far do we take this? Do we apply it to academic disciplines? If I was to use a similar logic, I would have to come to the conclusion that I need to eliminate my science and engineering curricula. These folks need lots of specialized laboratories and equipment, and that means serious money. On the other hand, the English Lit. majors need little more than a room to meet in. It's a lot cheaper to educate English Lit. majors than Engineering majors, but is that what we want all of our colleges to do? I think a campus consisting of engineering, chemistry, English, philosophy, etc. majors is much more valuable and interesting than one consisting of a single highly profitable major. The same is true with sports or any other pursuit.