Nebraska did not turn a profit on athletics until Bob Devaney retired from the
athletic director's spot and Bill Byrne replaced him sometime in the early to
mid 90's. Devaney, as popular as he was from his football coaching days, nearly
ran the Husker's athletic department into the ground, neglecting facility
maintanence and renovations and not increasing revenue when he had the chance.
There was serious talk of shutting down many sports since the Legislatre wasn't
about to pay for UNL athletics.

Bill Byrne has since raised football prices while expanding the stadium and
adding club seats/skyboxes, gotten major donors and partnerships to: renovate
the Devaney Center (basketball - indoor track), the Colossium (volleyball),
build Haymarket Park (new Baseball field), start new women's sports, and so on
and so forth. Oh, and he's also made Nebraska a perennial top 6 program in the
Sears Cup standings. The only truly negative thing he's done is he cut men's
swimming, though longtime football ticket holders feel slighted as prices have
gone up and some have been forced to switch seats. Given the alternative
though, which would be cutting many more sports, I understand his reasoning
behind turning football into as big a cash cow as he can find.

Nebraska makes its money from 2 sports currently; football (roughly $1 million
profit per home game plus the extras) and basketball ($500k profit for the
season, down from $1.5 mil about 5-10 years ago). The other sports do not make
more than they spend, though some are closer to being in the black than others.
Women's Volleyball doesn't do too badly, since the Colossium has been sold out
for seasons at roughly 4,000 people per match but it does still lose money in
the end. and baseball is the new rising sport, having gone from 60 season
ticket holders a decade ago to over 3,600 season ticket holders, including some
new luxury box seats at the new stadium, for this coming year (amazing what a
new coach, a CWS appearance, and a new stadium can do).

After all the bookkeeping is done, the athletic dept. at Lincoln pretty much
breaks even, and that's after giving $1,000,000 to the general University fund.

To keep this hockey related, UNO athletics are funded by the legislature, but
the state won't fund any new ones. Thus hockey at UNO not only has to pay for
itself, but also for the 3 women's sports started up for Title IX reasons. I
believe after that there's usually some $ left over which goes toward the
general athletic budget and has helped pay for some weight room renovations and
the like.