That's from your perspective, which seems like a purely economic one.
From THEIR perspective, they are judged by holding costs down, bringing money in, etc. This includes travel and equipment and facilities and a lot of other stuff in addition to the inflated tuition that goes into the budget as real dollars along with everything else that you would consider real dollars, though you apparently don't consider the tuition real dollars.
Steel has talked to college coaches about this, including Schloss; have YOU talked to anyone about this or are you just pulling things out of your dogbutt?
And certain of the powers that be also consider lost opportunity costs
I sat on the board at TCU that handles this concept for over 10 years....and I sit on it now at a State school....how about you?
Tuition dollars are only real when they are "paid" to the University. Beyond that it is a measurement bar that has only indirect correlation to the cost of attendance.
If we remove 10 full scholarship athletes from the football team - the bottom of the P&L statement at TCU does not go up $650k. The only direct costs saved are for food, books (or whatever they get now) and some level of reduction in the cost of housing based on maintenance, utilities, etc with less students. The deprecation of the capital asset does not decrease at all.
There is the potential to reduce faculty costs if we eliminated enough students to reduce faculty - given the size of the normal baseball roster - that would be about 2 faculty at the current student:teacher ratio.
There is a legitimate argument to be made for lost opportunity revenue for housing since we only have so many rooms at TCU. But that is really the only lost revenue because we don't cap the number of students down to a level that 30 players is going to change who and how many we let in - so there really is not "lost" tuition revenue from giving a tuition scholarship to a student.
So if you wanted to say we could reduce the cost of faculty about $400k by eliminating two lower level positions, we we would spend about $210k less per year in food and book costs (high but I will be conservative) and we would gain about $400k a year in additional housing revenue by not giving those rooms to baseball players - I would be willing to concede that the "real" costs of scholarships for our baseball team if we were fully funded is a little over $1 million/year.
That number is offset at TCU by the fact that we only get 11.7 scholarships and the remainder of the cost is "paid" by the athlete - which results in a tuition collected amount from players of about $1.1 million....
So basically the academic "cost" to TCU of having a baseball team with 11.7 scholarships is essentially ZERO because the paying players offset the scholarships.
And all of that has nothing to do with the level of capital investment that is required to be a top tier baseball program in D1 or the operating budget to run the actual program - which is where Schloss is focused.