From the end of the article:
The University of Michigan, for instance, is a Big Ten member with an endowment of about $8 billion. If it wants a field hockey team, it can most certainly afford one. Cutting football players past and present in on some of the tens of millions that program generates or allowing them to profit off their own likeness or to put a percentage of jersey sales into a trust fund, isn't going to bankrupt the school. And if Title IX can't be reworked (and it almost assuredly can), then Michigan would do just that to comply with federal law.
What Delany is saying is that left to its own decision, Michigan won't see field hockey as worth the money. He's acknowledging that outside the myopic prism of the athletic department, gold-plated, non-revenue sports don't make much sense.
Right now Michigan athletics gets 100 percent of the revenue and things roll on. If the players get a cut, then it will have to "reduce opportunities for student-athletes overall."
So it's the players' share of the revenue – the money the O'Bannon case is trying to divert – that is propping up the other sports … the same other sports that Delany doesn't believe the university itself considers a sound investment.
Which begs a simple, if inadvertent question: if Michigan doesn't think it should pay for a field hockey team, then why does it think Denard Robinson should?



Wetzel is just another writer who apparently hates college sports. Such a shame.