Stanford offers 31 sports and Cal 28, by far the most in the (former) Pac 12 and more than most schools in the nation. Once these sports are entrenched they are very hard to eliminate as there are rules from Article IX regarding the ratio of male to female athletes that make it very hard to eliminate a sport. These schools should be applauded for providing so many opportunities for athletes to get an education at two top universities in the nation and the world. Cal has 900 student athletes currently (although many are not on scholarship or on partial) and Cal needs the money from football to subsidize them (a few sports might be endowed fully or partially). Stanford of course has a huge endowment that you would think could be tapped except that they have a self-imposed limit on what can be spent on non-academic items. As for an alternative for mediocre students in Olympic sports this is not USC, the students must be qualified. It happens that the so-called Olympic sports are ones, like swimming, tennis, gymnastics, are populated by students from families that can afford the enormous expense of traveling teams, sports camps, etc. The students that would get into Stanford and Cal, in other words. Yes, their football teams are down now but it was not that long ago that Stanford was winning Pac 12 titles, although for Cal it has been longer, back to the Jeff Tedford days. Cal's basketball has been beyond terrible, but they have a new coach and an influx of transfers that will turn them around. It is crucial that both teams (and I speak as a Cal grad who has been following Cal sports for close to 60 years) get into a Power 5 conference. It's the money, and unfortunately that's all that matters today, not tradition.
