If that's the case they are never going to pay their own way. It's the billions of TV dollars that support men's basketball.
More on this..... "baseball programs dig a deeper financial hole than any other college sport, according to the NCAA. In 2012, the median deficit for a baseball team was $675,000, with swim teams following close behind at $555,000 and ice hockey at $530,000." With luxury boxes at $35k, average game attendance at over 10k, annual tuition at just under $11k and an 11.7 scholarship limit, it makes sense that LSU baseball is self-sustaining and then some. It's much more difficult for private schools to compete for recruits with much less money to divide.
USC used to do pretty good in baseball for a private school. When Skip Bergman was AD he wanted to sell beer at baseball games but they wouldn't let him. He said if he could baseball would not only pay for itself but make A profit.
Well, yea, Rod Dedeaux won 11 NC's and once the scholarship limits were imposed in the mid-70's, USC only had one other title in 1998. Cal St Fullerton has been the dominant So Cal college since that time and their annual tuition is well under $10k. Stanford had some success but they have one of the largest endowments in the country. Scholarship limits were stupid. They should have just told each school to divide the money the way they see fit and then account for it.
I can make that argument....but the NCAA imposed those limits. "Article 15.5.3.1 of the NCAA Division I bylaws states: "There shall be a limit on the value of financial aid awards that an institution may provide in any academic year to counters in the following … sports." It then goes on to detail, without explanation, precisely how many scholarships an FBS college can offer. The maximum allotment, for 23 different sports, is detailed in the chart on the right. Some sports, such as football or women's gymnastics, are "head count" sports, meaning every athlete who gets aid receives a full scholarship. Others, such as men's soccer or wrestling, are "equivalency" sports, meaning a coach can divvy up the allotment into partial scholarships, as long as the total of all offers doesn't exceed the limit. For some equivalency sports, there are also limits on the number of players who can get any fraction of a scholarship -- also known as "counters." Baseball teams, for example, can have a maximum of 27 counters; women's ice hockey teams can have 30. Of course, all teams can have non-scholarship walk-ons, too, but scholarships are the currency of the recruiting realm, and the list to the right determines how they must be distributed. And, to repeat, Title IX didn't create that list. The NCAA did. Although scholarship limits came into effect around the same time as Title IX, in the mid-1970s, that's a coincidence. Back then, the NCAA was concerned that major football programs were hoarding players by giving them financial aid. Pittsburgh coach Johnny Majors reportedly gave scholarships to 90 freshmen in 1973, a move that came under scrutiny when the Panthers won the national championship in 1977. In response, the NCAA tried to ensure some equity of competition within particular sports. But how does the NCAA allocate scholarships across sports? On the men's side, the answer is clear once you pit the limits against the number of athletes it takes to fill a sport's roster..... Put simply, scholarship limits protect and promote revenue sports. The NCAA allows individual schools to fund specific men's sports only to the degree that those sports make money nationally. That means LSU -- or any other school -- can't give out more than 11.7 baseball scholarships, even if it were willing to shift grants from its basketball or football or golf teams. The NCAA admits that, for some time now, its scholarship rules have been geared toward generating money. "For men's sports in Division I, the NCAA membership determined in 1974 to separate football and basketball financial aid from other sports," says spokesman Cameron Schuh. "This move was predicated on the ability of those sports at that time to generate revenue for the institutions as compared to the other sports the institutions fielded." It's just easy for the NCAA to let Title ix get the blame.
