While university presidents are frustrated and flabbergasted by the spiraling, unsustainable cost of running big-time college sports teams, they are struggling to find solutions, especially in dire economic times.

With reform again on their minds, the members of the Knight Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics met Monday in downtown Miami to discuss how to reduce the excesses of football and basketball programs.

``There used to be two basketball coaches and now there are more people in suits than in uniforms,'' said Charles E. Young, president emeritus of the University of Florida and chancellor emeritus of UCLA. ``I'm on the sideline at a football game and the number of people down there who are being paid by somebody is astronomical.''

The Knight Commission celebrated its 20th anniversary of pushing and prodding universities to stay true to their primary mission of educating student-athletes and got right back to work examining its latest findings in a survey of 95 presidents on the financial state of sports.

Add exploding coaches' salaries plus huge debt payments on sports facilities and athletic costs are growing three to four times faster than academic costs at 120 Football Bowl Subdivision schools. Presidents believe the traditional business model is headed toward collapse. Eighty percent of FBS schools are losing money, with an average deficit of $10 million, and the wealthiest programs are generating 14 times more revenue than those at the bottom.

``The data is eye-opening and quite troubling,'' said commission co-chairman William E. Kirwan, chancellor of the University of Maryland system. ``We've reached an indefensible, unsustainable situation. Universities are being forced to eliminate programs, reduce hiring, increase class size -- and tuition increases are growing at double-digit rates. We can't continue on this path of financing intercollegiate athletics.''

PREACHING REGULATION

Commission member Hodding Carter III said the overheated college sports market is a ``microcosm'' of what happened when the U.S. economy imploded last year.

``It's the same kind of market that drove us over a cliff,'' said Carter, professor of leadership and public policy at the University of North Carolina. ``So we've got to make the same argument for intelligent regulation in college sports as we did in the larger economy.''

Among the key findings:

• Eighty percent of presidents agree there should be sweeping changes but believe they have limited power without consensus -- from their boards of trustees to the NCAA.

``A president can't announce in his conference that he's going to hold salaries down and still be viable,'' said commission co-chairman Gerald Turner, president of Southern Methodist University. ``Presidents don't feel the wealthy institutions are ready to address financial issues. Until they feel their conference has a unanimous sense of the problems there is some sense of pessimism about reform.''

• Less than a quarter of presidents believe intercollegiate athletics are sustainable in current form.

• Eighty-five percent say salaries for football and basketball coaches are excessive and the greatest impediment to sustainability.

• Forty-eight percent believe economic malaise will affect the number of varsity sports their schools can offer.

• Presidents believe athletic success leads to more robust fundraising, attracts higher quality students, enhances school spirit and raises a school's profile but research generally does not support such correlations.

• Presidents are concerned about the widening gap between haves and have-nots and that sports are seen as occupying a position of privilege in tough times.

Commercialism in college sports is not a new issue, former CBS Sports president Neal Pilson told the commission, reminding it of a 1929 report by the Carnegie commission. The question is how best to distribute the TV revenue generated by football and basketball broadcasts.

DIVIDING THE PIE

``Commercialism hasn't gone away and frankly I don't think we want it to go away,'' he said. ``The real challenge for universities is how to manage success and divide the pie. The smaller schools simply cannot draw audiences. The subsidy will have to come from bigger schools to smaller schools.''

Salary costs have more than doubled since 2000, said Dutch Baughman, head of the Division I-A Athletic Directors Association. His group has seven recommendations, including the elimination of foreign travel and hotel housing for football teams on nights before home games and limiting the amount of support personnel, such as videographers.

Big Ten Conference commissioner Jim Delany said that for too long schools have chased higher revenues rather than slashing expenses.

``Cutting costs is a contact sport,'' he said. ``Unless you're prepared in a conflict-rich environment to deal with boosters, board members, power coaches and the public, you don't take it on.''