Richard,

I wasn't sure where this article came from and if you were inserting your own comments in Red. But I put the title of the article in Google and I found it came from the NCAA Double-A-Zone which was stated to be the official blog of the NCAA. I think you were putting points that you were wanting to emphasize in Red.

I went to Duke's latest EADA report for the 10/16/06 to 10/15/07 period. It showed that Duke's sports revenue for the period was $47.507,169 just a little more than the $47,391,264 that it was showing for total sports expenses. That is not really not much of a net profit on that amount of revenue. I don't know if this $47 million of revenue includes the school subsidy of $7.5 million which is doubling to $15 million as reported by the NCAA blog article that you site in this topic. In contrast KU in its latest EADA report was showing total sports revenue at $65,194,721 vs. expenses of $58,046,962.

The thing that concerns me in this Duke report is that if $7,500,000 of that reported $47 million in revenue is really from subsidy then that means they are really operating at that much of loss and it appears that the loss would be growing to $15 million. I also saw from their participants report that there were 3,267 male students and 2,947 female students and there are 369 male athletes vs. only 248 female so that seems to be in some Title IX compliance potential trouble. I am concerned that this means that the Duke wrestling program could be vulnerable.

parkwayred, I understand your feelings. It gets to me too when I think of these basketball and football coaches making salaries that we know that could fund two to three college wrestling programs. In looking at Duke's EADA report in further detail I did notice that its basketball revenues were over $13 million and only had $8 million of expenses. When you look at it from that point of view, Duke University would no doubt look at their coach's salary as a bargain. And in reality, the profits from the Duke basketball team have in part been used to help subsidize the Duke wrestling team.

This is part of the reason why I have been becoming a supporter of the idea of a National College Wrestling Endowment fund. I think wrestling has to start developing the financial clout to become more self sufficient in order to survive and grow in colleges across America. I believe we need to do that by a two fold approach to funding by endowing our local college programs like Fort Hays State, Newman and now Baker along with our junior colleges and by endowing a national college endowment fund that the NWCA is at this time considering to become trustees of.