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Originally Posted by Solecismic
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.
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The Akron e-sports arena was only 750k and it was donor-funded, not paid for by athletic department funds. Varsity E-sports athletes aren't on full rides, they only get a $1k scholly.
Schools can afford to do whatever they want, sports do cost money but scholarships are not real money being spent but merely discounts on a drop in the bucket towards institutional enrollment. D3 schools surely do cost themselves money with sports and need to do play to play because their margins are so thin unless they have big endowments, but...D1 schools, even the state supported ones aren't going broke from sports, they're wasting money in other ways.
Football is a big part of this waste, there's no women's sport that nearly comes close to the bloat that football offers.