Columnist for the Washington Post Charles Lane writes today about the University of Maryland cutting eight teams from NCAA competition in a cost-cutting move. An excerpt:

In other words: For all the expensive hoopla over football and men’s basketball — and for all their scandals — the NCAA wants you to know that most student-athletes compete in joyful obscurity and really are scholars as well as jocks.
So how come the University of Maryland is about to dump eight intercollegiate athletic teams, including, yes, men’s tennis and women’s water polo?
Despite the televised exploits of Terrapin football and men’s basketball, the athletic department at College Park has run millions of dollars in deficits for five years. Something had to give, so university President Wallace D. Loh accepted a commission’s recommendation to cut the teams. Together with administrative savings, this should reduce the athletic budget by about $5 million next year.
What we have here is a case study in the true priorities of big NCAA member institutions. Some teams on the chopping block are bastions of the student-athlete ideal at College Park. Except for men’s tennis, they have some of the Maryland athletic program’s highest graduation rates — 90 percent for men’s cross-country and track, according to an October NCAA report.
Fewer than half of the Maryland men’s basketball players and fewer than 60 percent of football players graduate, embarrassing a university that prides itself on high academic standards.

And . . .

An alternative strategy might be to reduce the “revenue” programs to a more human scale — say, the lower-budget approach of the academically excellent schools, such as the Naval Academy and Bucknell, that participate in the Patriot League. There’s no law that says Maryland, or any other school, has to play in the Atlantic Coast Conference.

Lane is wrong on multiple fronts. First off, the four-year graduation rate for the entire student body at Maryland is, according to U.S. News & World Report, 62 percent. The football program’s graduation rate was 59 percent. Why are football players the embarrassment here?

Second, Lane’s solution to move Maryland from the ultra-competitive ACC to college football’s second tier is the wrong approach.

The problem with revenue sports at big college campuses today is the fact that the university uses those dollars to fund its other athletic programs. With all the talk of actually paying college players for their time on the field or court, what does Lane, et al. think will happen to the overall costs? Under the current formula where the revenue producing sports subsidize the non-revenue producing ones, this just makes sports like football and basketball more expensive and more cuts will happen to the non-revenue generating sports.

What should happen is universities need to stop this accounting gimmickry and decide from a macro level which sports it wants on campus and which it does not. And then find a way to pay for the sports it wants. Asking the revenue producing sports to fund the other athletic endeavors on campus because the administrators don’t want to make tough funding decisions should come to an end.