The Sunday Albuquerque Journal had an interesting article which broke down the NMSU athletics budget. As seen below in the image taken directly from the article, the athletics department receives $11 million from the University itself (mostly taxpayers), the State of New Mexico, and students (who have no choice but to pay).
The additional sources of revenue in 2019 come to a total of $6.2 million. That means essentially 64% of the program’s budget is “subsidized.” Not included in that is the largest non-subsidy of $2.9 million which was received by essentially sacrificing a loss playing MUCH better football teams (like Alabama) which pay NMSU to come to town for the ostensible purpose of getting crushed.
Even with the subsidies, according to the article, the athletics program was able to scrape by dipping into $500,000 worth of reserves. And these are the best economic times New Mexico has seen in a over a decade. Is this sustainable? To be fair, at least NMSU balanced its budget. UNM did not.
