Does football distract a university from its core mission?

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As we begin to recover, somewhat, from the FAMU athletics meltdown and the unwanted national attention from week zero of the college football season, now may be a good time to reflect: do universities, particularly HBCUs, have a healthy relationship with football?  Or has our cultural fascination with football allowed our public institutions of learning to drop the ball on universities core objective.
 
We all know about the growing cost of going to college.  Yet many may not know some of this growth is due to the cost of college athletics, commonly driven by football.  The American Association of University Professors points out that the growth in college costs are not equal across institutional programs, and in recent years much of the growth hints as a systemic bias towards athletic spending.  Looking over seven recent years that included the Great Recession, costs per-athlete increased by 25 percent or more across various types of institutions, while instructional spending per student was more or less flat.
 
Universities spend much more on student athletes than regular full-time students

According to the Delta Cost Project, institutions typically spend three to six as much on each student athlete than they spend on each full-time student.  Part of these costs may be justifiable.  Sports are an important part of making a university standout in the public sphere, and success in sports helps to drive applicants and raise selectivity.  Athletics can also be a mechanism through which alumni stay connected to the institution that can come with a payout and prompt a bump in donations.
 
A money loser 

While there is the notion that college football is a big source of revenue for major institutions, for HBCUs that not always the case. Revenues coming in do not always signal a profit. Costs for many college football programs exceed revenues in even the most prosperous athletic conferences.   Outside of the major athletic conferences, deficits are even more acute.
 
Increases college costs for non-student athletes

2021 FAMU Athletics operating budget

Deficits have to be covered somehow, and often its student fees and general tution funds that help subsidize athletic programs in the red. In other words, the cost of college football is a part of the growing cost of college and it helps contribute in a modest way to the growing balance of student loans, now exceeding $1.2 trillion nationwide.

In 2021, student fees covered nearly $4m of FAMU's $8.58 m operating budget.

I’m not against football, but I do think we as a society should collectively examine whether our culture of sports – with football at the top – may be distracting us from our schools’ main goals. After all, though there are a few excellent college athletes who can make it to the pros, there are far more students who stand to benefit from re-aligning the actions of our universities with their academic, democratic objectives.