Schools would be seriously considering ditching it IF they were truly losing money.

Let's face it, universities are huge economic engines, and they have very complex structures, and equally complex and flexible ways of allocating costs and revenues, from an accounting standpoint (full disclosure, I'm a CPA, and have worked in the non-profit area for years, so I know how it can work), so I'm willing to guess that of 100 schools, for example, all 100 are doing it a little differently, in how they do their 'fund accounting' as it is called, and how they are analyzing the numbers.

You come and poor mouth your numbers, give the woe is me story to alumni, that football needs more money, and what happens, football gets more money. If you are doing too well, you can start sliding some peripheral costs into athletics, to drag them down.

And, from a marketing perspective, for some, maybe football is a "loss leader," as they are referred to in the retail world - some products are sold at a loss to get you in the grocery store to sell you other stuff.

But, in short, its a shell game, a very complex one, and if they weren't winning at the shell game, they wouldn't be playing.