This article from the front page of the sports section of USA Today should certainly start the discussions going again at OU and other places around the MAC.

http://www.usatoday.com/sports/college/2011-06-23-2011-athletic-department-subsidy-table_n.htm

Nothing will happen until McDavis leaves.  After that, I doubt OU will do anything without other MAC schools doing so as well.  So, I don't think anything will change.

Still, at the end of the day, you're only talking about 1-2% of the university budget. I've never seen so much attention given to something that's such a small part of the grand picture. There's a whole other 98% out there to criticize, much of it non-academic and arguable wasteful too.

Also interesting to note that those three FCS schools spend considerably more than we do.  JOKE!

And the main story says Rutgers is in a whole bunch of turmoil over subsidies:

http://www.usatoday.com/sports/college/2011-06-28-rutgers...

This is an area were there needs to be some standardization of accounting practices. I love all these statements that show 0 profit, or whatever. Obviously the numbers are fudged somewhere to get to that. Let's look specifically at the numbers from those two articles, and I can show that they appear to show very different things. The first article shows Ohio with $18,713,965 in subsidies, and claims that the subsidies constitute 78% of the budget. OK, doing the math, that implies a total budget of $23,992,263, meaning that there was revenue of $5,278,298 from all other sources.

Turning to the next article, it shows Ohio with $7,467,896 of football revenues. There are also going to be basketball revenues, and volleyball, too, and presumably some general revenue from sports licensing. These numbers appear to be in conflict with the first article. In fact, there is a direct conflict because they second article show that subsidies were $16,460,250.00, not the $18.7m from the first one.

By the way, I don't see much difference between "direct institutional support" and financing via student fees. You can charge the students separate fees for certain things, or you can bundle it all in the tuition, and then divide it up, and it ends up being the same thing. It's like where some landlords charge me one number called "rent", while others charge a smaller "rent" but also add a "CAM charge". In the end what matters is the size of the check I mail in, not how it's labelled.

I believe that when you look at the student fees that go to ICA you will find much of it going to the Administration of ICA not necessarily the individual sports.  I think you could identify FB or BB revenues and subtract direct sport expenses to see the "loss" (or profit) for each program.  You could do the same for non revenue sorts.  The remaining transfer of fee monies covers the "other/administrative" expenses of ICA which tend NOT to be allocated as in cost accounting for the total cost of a sport.

Also a portion of that subsidy is scholarship money, essentially student fees are subsidizing athletic scholarships. Almost 50% of that money. As the price of tuition and room and board increases that subsidy will correspondingly increase.