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Originally Posted by bob
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As I wrote earlier, look at Army and Navy if you want to see how scholarships work in Division I when you don't have the same Title IX compliance issues. You get more men's sports, but not less women's sports. Universities do not reluctantly have sports programs. They have what they can afford. I can't emphasize enough that none of these sports, anywhere, generate any profit, football or no football. So having these programs is considered part of the university experience.
What happens when football moves outside? The gap between super-league and everyone else grows. But it's still expensive, outside what would be the super-league, to finance football.
Nothing really changes, then. Athletics at universities are still funded by the government and by mandatory student fees. And while many universities are tempted to drop football or never had a football team, alumni hate losing those teams.
Around here, Akron got itself into severe financial trouble because, among other things, they decided to spend enormous amounts of money on an e-sports stadium. So the powers that be spent more money making an extensive report about dropping football, only to conclude that to drop football meant leaving the MAC and the cost of leaving the MAC was greater than ten years of running the money-losing football program.
So they laid off a lot of professors (of course, administrators were relatively untouched) and called it a day.