Actually this is not true. Many top athletics programs lose substantial amounts of money, even after accounting for TV deals, https://www.washingtonpost.com/sf

Actually this is not true. Many top athletics programs lose substantial amounts of money, even after accounting for TV deals, https://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/sports/wp/2015/11/23/running-up-the-bills https://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/sports/wp/2015/11/23/runni... There’s some unsubstantiated claim that constantly growing expenditure on sports is requires like a marketing arms race to advertise to potential students, but I haven’t seen much data backing that. My guessis that, just as with most professional sports clubs, college athletics programs by design are intrinsically huge loss leaders designed to be vehicles by which coaches & administrators extract money from the university. For the tiny fraction of top teams with massive fan bases, they can get away with this while being profitable. For almost all other programs, they burn through money chasing success and profitability for a while, and after enough consecutive seasons of financial losses, they retreat to fiscal austerity and a decline in the athletics department while some other programs are on an upswing.