accounting. Using the example posted on the Back Room earlier, every athletic scholarship granted to a ND team will result in a $57,000 bill to the Athletic Department. The actual marginal cost of having one more student sit in on a English Comp class, or any other course offering is more or less nil. But there ae actual costs, housing, training table, etc... The accounting costs are much higher than the actual cash outlays for having those incremental students on campus.

Therefore, we have a situation where most athletic departments "lose" money, yet they can't wait to start a football program. The UT Athletic Department is not losing money, not in the way we think of it.

if there were not a football player taking that seat in class there could be a regular student paying $57,000 cash. That's an actual reduction in cash received and therefore is effectively a "cash outlay."

The only way you can argue otherwise is if you assume class sizes are infinity, because the argument that "you can always cram one more in" would apply to a paying student as well.

Tennessee's last BCS game was a Fiesta Bowl loss to Nebraska on January 1, 2000. Since then, they're 99-65 -- including just 28-34 since 2008, Tennessee's worst prolonged stretch of football in the last 100 years.

like the "new $50 million Brenda Lawson Athletic Center" mentioned in the article. If they have locked in today's historically low interest rates, this should be reduced over time as the principal balance declines. If, on the other hand, they have used variable rate financing, either directly or via a swap, they could see the cost balloon when the Fed allows rates to increase. This is a big part of the "arms race" to be a "Top Ten" program.