Football is the most profitable and most colleges do make money on it. https://sports.usatoday.com/ncaa/finances Not only is sports usually profitable on the surface but it draws donations and new students. Administrators aren't as stupid as you think. Sports need not cost a huge amount of money. Stadiums used for one sport can easily be used for other purposes instead of letting it lay fallow in the time between football games.

It always amazes me that people simultaneously say that colleges are sharks when it comes to maximizing tuition and minimizing expenses, while also saying that sports are objectively a waste of money. They aren't stupid. If sports wasn't a desirable thing to invest in, they wouldn't do it. We could make the same complaint about luxury amenities too. The fact is that colleges have to compete with each other, and they charge enough to pay for everything.

Could tuition be lower if not for all of these luxuries? Maybe so. Should core education get more money? Perhaps. It certainly used to bother me that sports got more money than academics. But I really get that it's a legitimate business decision to allocate some money to sports. I don't even like sports much but I would not cut it out if I were them.