It figures - this site has been citing these USA Today reports longer than anyone, and when the full 2011 data finally came out, things have been so hectic that I haven't really had time to look at them in depth until now. On one hand, it's really good that these numbers are out there as opposed to the fiction that most athletic departments make money. However, that last part cannot be stressed enough. Football drives the bus. When you look at sport-specific breakdowns, as Bloomberg provided last year, the spending problem at schools like Rutgers clearly isn't football. It's everything else. Rutgers certainly fares very poorly in these rankings, and the reasons are clear. The Big East's television contract is atrocious, which is why Tim Pernetti has no choice but to take direct control of Big East television negotiations. Rutgers also clearly is in the hole of having to make up for lost time in football. Not only do other programs already have decades of fan support to fall back on, but they also likely subsidized facility upgrades during boom years when no one was really looking, while Rutgers is still forced to play catchup for the early-90s expansion that was never completed as originally projected. The revenue numbers show that Kirk Ciarrocca driving the offense into the ground badly hurt revenue, which is no surprise. Losing, especially losing so egregious, will tend to do that. That goes to show why the Dowlings of the world really are off their rocker. Like it or not, Rutgers has chosen to go down the path of big-time athletics, At this point, the facilities are fixed costs that will exist either way, even though tuition is a pretty big factor too. If you even want to entertain the fantasy that football is the problem rather than too many olympic sports, if football suddenly disappears tomorrow, then the athletic department is in far worse fiscal shape due to those fixed costs still being in place.