When people look at the balance sheet of the athletics department what they don't consider is that athletics is a glorified marketing tool for the university as a whole. It engages alumni in a way that nothing else can. You dump football and you lose a huge way to market your school. This is something that academia tends to ignore when looking at ADs' budgets. In the year Johnny Football won the Heisman, Texas A&M raised a record $740M for the school (not associated with athletics). At many of these schools, if you simply changed the name of the "athletics department" to the "marketing department" and kept the budget the same no one would bat an eye.