People keep saying this, but the fact is football is the most expensive sport too, and the universities could easily afford to fund Olympic Sports without having to pay for football. It wasn't always that football programs brought in enough to fund the entire athletic departments. In fact it has only been since the 1970s that most colleges thought about it in those terms. Before that, funding athletics was just like funding any department. Most departments cost the university, a few select ones made the university money. Most universities now make more revenue from research grants in science, medicine and engineering, than football by a sizeable margin. But, of course, education, history, sociology, psychology, etc. costs more than they bring in.
