A) Athletics exist for the athletes, not for the fan.
B) Capping or limiting coaches salaries in no way prevents fans from spending their money as they wish. The AA has extra money at the end of the year? Hey, why not give it back to the university or the students from whom they get much support, or put it away in case of a rainy day
C) If you decide to forgoe being competitive in football or basketball, you lose ticket sales, the biggest chunk of revenue, only hurting your problem. Those most likely tighter budgets are the smaller sports. (See A)
D) The quality of the school has nothing to do with this problem. Texas is a great academic school, and always one of the most profitable programs
E) Currently, student do subsidize student athletics through student fees
Replies
A) College athletics does not exist for the athletes. That's what the YMCA exists for, and your local club teams. College athletics could not exist in any way shape or form without the money provided by viewers. It is a business.
B) Capping coach salaries does effectively limit our ability to spend our entertainment dollars as we wish. Since teams cannot pay players, the only real way they can improve by spending money is with hiring better coaches. If you had a low salary cap, massive schools like Ohio would have enormous numbers of fans disappointed year after year... while a few thousand students and alumni of some no-name school compete for the championship. It doesn't make any sense. Let capitalism work.
C) The budget for each sport is calculated separately. Why should the football team subsidize the rowing team? If the smaller sports are not making money, and do not have an added benefit of attracting new students, then they should be scaled down. Likewise, if the tennis team is indeed making a profit, then its budget will not be cut to subsidize a money losing football team. If the football programs budget cannot be cut without losing even more money, then it should probably be canceled.
D) The quality of the school absolutely affects the problem. Do you think Tech would have as good of a football team without our management programs, humanities, and the like? No way. We have a good football program because we have certain majors that a person of average intelligence can do well in, and the majority of our good football players major in those. Northwestern is an elite school... who many of those have good football programs? MIT, Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Cornell, Dartmouth, Brown, Duke... how many elite schools can you name with negligible football programs? Stanford is the only one that comes to mind. You can probably go down the list of college rankings and barely hit a good football team until mid way down.
E) That is true, but student fees make up a small part of overall revenues. Without significant viewer support, the price of college athletics would be too high. Students would also rebel at paying high fees to watch ****ty teams.