Collegiate sports teams are effectively the same as student tutors, student RAs, student librarians, or any other school-sponsored jobs that hire students. One could argue that they're even superior at schools like Alabama because they provide even more money to be used on scholarships.
Alabama could take away their football program, but they would 1) take away scholarship money from the 30-50 low-income scholarship athletes, 2) take away money that could be reinvested into buildings, facilities, teachers, or academic scholarships, and 3) reduce alumni donations (because unhappy alumni don't donate), which further reduces the funds available to the school.
It's one thing if a school has sports programs that aren't a net gain for the university. But for the schools where it is, any talk of them removing the funding is absurdly ignorant.
Collegiate sports teams are not like other school-sponsored jobs. Student librarians cannot make millions of dollars if they plied their librarian skills on the open market. At least some college football players could. Student librarians don't face high risk of physical injury, disability, or long term health effects as part of their job. College football players do.
Pulling in 100m in revenue to supply 50 scholarships doesn't seem like the right tag line.
Also see below, most college sports revenue does not get pushed back into general academics.
Most alumni donations are to the university's athletic association - that's because those donations comes with the perks that alumni want - seats, being wined and dine, shaking the coach's hand, etc.
Talk of removing funding is absurd because its a system that's been this way for a long time - of course it would seem absurb to change it.
This is especially true in Alabama's case.
The idea that football programs generate substantial revenue that improves academics for the entire university is not true.
[1] http://www.ethosreview.org/intellectual-spaces/is-college-fo...
[1] http://www.collegedata.com/cs/data/college/college_pg03_tmpl...
