[ams6110]

Many of the highly-paid elite coaches also either directly fund or by virtue of their reputation and network attract funding for endowments or gifts.

[dalke]

So noted. However, in the numbers I saw for the University of Illinois budget, the total endowments and gifts was about 1/7th of that of grant funding.

I have not done any extensive analysis of this. My comment was mostly to highlight that the previous poster was making statements that I could not easily accept as being true.