Athletic programs seeing red

Here's some interesting pieces from an Associated Press story about major college athletic department finances:

INDIANAPOLIS (AP) — Most of the nation’s college athletic departments are still trying to get out of the red zone.
The NCAA’s latest report on revenues and expenses, released Tuesday, showed that fewer than 25 percent of all Football Bowl Subdivision schools made money in 2007-08, while the remaining 302 schools competing in Division I struggled to break even.
Twenty-five of 119 FBS schools reported overall profits, an increase from 19 in 2006.
The report’s author, Dan Fulks, the faculty representative at Transylvania University, described the results as a basic lesson in college sports’ class system.
“If you’re not selling a bunch of tickets and you don’t have a large alumni-booster base making contributions, and you’re not in the right conference, you have very little chance of showing net positive revenue,” Fulks said in a statement on the NCAA’s web site.
The NCAA collected data from 2004 through 2008 but did not identify individual schools or teams in the report.

... The greatest expenses, as usual, are scholarships, salaries and benefits.
Football coaches in the FBS now have a median annual salary of $1.095 million, according to the report. Men’s basketball coaches are making $822,000 while women’s basketball coaches are paid $277,000.

... Of the 119 FBS football teams, 68 (57.1 percent) finished the year in the black. Of the 119 FBS schools playing men’s basketball, 67 made a profit. But only one of those same 119 schools made money in women’s basketball in 2008.