depending on which profitability number you look at.

I took the published numbers for all 230 athletic departments that USA Today tracks. The USA Today data is only public school data, so BYU isn't included. BYU's data is available from the Dept. of Education, however, so I added BYU to the mix. I also pulled the data for Notre Dame and Stanford. Are there any other private schools that you want me to add?

I then took the modified USA Today data and dumped it into a spreadsheet and added some columns to figure profitability. Alabama has the most profitable AD ($27M). Texas has the most revenue, but only turns a profit of $18.8M, good for #6. BYU's profit of $6.6M is #18 in the country. There are 129 out of the 233 schools that show a profit. Utah comes in at #227 showing a net loss of $2.66M.

I also did some calculations to remove the government and school subsidies. When the subsidies are removed, the numbers become more interesting. There are only 22 colleges that would turn a profit if you were to take away their subsidies. Stanford comes in at #23 and breaks even. Ohio State is the most profitable school when subsidies are removed with a true net profit of $23.6M. Ohio State is followed by Alabama, Oklahoma, Texas, Florida, Oregon, Notre Dame, Michigan, LSU, Kansas, K State, aTm, and BYU. From a true net profitability standpoint, BYU is #13. Utah comes in with an unsubsidized profit ranking of #167

This goes a long way towards explaining why BYU can and will pay the full COA.

(The data I used is here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1A9wneUMePyEl3h11Ed5dLS30ZSkGLoYlPQd78jPtZ2Q/edit?usp=sharing )