I wonder why...
"Schools in the Southeastern Conference are the biggest athletic spenders, and have the widest gap between school spending and sports spending. Median athletic spending, per athlete, was $163,931 in the SEC in 2010; the median academic spending, per student, that year was $13,390. So on a per capita basis, SEC schools spent 12.2 times as much on sports than on academics (note: all the data, throughout the study, are for public institutions only). That’s the largest gap among the so-called “BCS ” conferences, which include the SEC, Big 12, Pac-10 (now the Pac-12), Big East, Big Ten and Big East. The Big East has the smallest gap. Spending per athlete in 2010 was $91,936; that was 6.7 times more than academic spending per student."
http://keepingscore.blogs.time.com/2013/01/17/athletics-over-academics-the-growing-college-sports-spending-gap/
Sundog,
If it was all about who spends the most money, the Yankees would win the World Series every year!
Besides, I think just looking at "spending" can be misleading. The article you reference makes it appear that this is a bad thing and that academics is suffering for sport. At LSU I know just the opposite to be true, and I would venture to guess the same holds true for many, possibly the majority of SEC schools.
While LSU is a public University, ZERO, public money goes to the football program, it's totally self sufficient. As a matter of fact, I'm pretty sure it carries every other athletic program on campus and in most, if not all years, makes a financial contribution to the academic portion of the university.
So, it's really not about how much they spend, but more about the net affect.