Steve Berkowitz, Christopher Schnaars and Jodi Upton, USA TODAY Sports

The University of California-Berkeley's dramatic, sustained decrease in its subsidization of its athletics program during a recent three-year period may well be replicable by other NCAA Division I schools.

But none has done it.

According to Cal athletics director Sandy Barbour and the campus' vice chancellor for administration and finance, John Wilton, none has even asked Cal officials how they did it.

"I think there are a couple of reasons for that — one of which is I think it's widely recognized that, in about every way imaginable, Berkeley's different," Barbour said with a chuckle.

Just five of the 227 public schools that were in Division I from 2009-10 through 2012-13 have managed to reduce their subsidies for athletics in each of the past three years, a USA TODAY Sports analysis found — Cal, Illinois, Missouri, South Carolina State and Southern Illinois. And Cal was the only one of those five to drop its subsidies by more than $1.2 million during those years.

USA TODAY Sports has collected the schools' financial information dating from the 2004-05 fiscal year. The data are now collected in conjunction with Indiana University's National Sports Journalism Center.

From 2009-10 through 2012-13, there were seven public schools that received no subsidy money in any of those four years: LSU, Nebraska, Ohio State, Oklahoma, Penn State, Purdue, Texas. All are members of one of the six elite conferences – the Atlantic Coast, Big 12, Big East, Big Ten, Pacific-12 and Southeastern .

Comparing figures from 2009-10 to those from 2012-13, roughly one in three of the other 48 power-conference public schools has reduced subsidies for athletics while one in 13 of the non-power-conference schools has done so.

This potentially adds fuel to the ongoing debate about the future look of major-college sports. The power conference schools' revenues are going to continue climbing with the start of the College Football Playoff and television-related developments like the continued growth of the Pac-12 Networks, the SEC Network's debut. Those schools are campaigning for changes in the NCAA's governance structure that would allow them to make rules changes such as increasing the value of athletic scholarship so it can fully cover the actual cost of attending college.

Schools outside the power conferences have resisted these types of changes, in part, because they know their athletics departments will have a tough time generating enough new revenues to cover the increased costs. That will mean falling further away from the elites – or continuing to increase subsidies, either by making greater demands on debt-burdened students or on tight university budgets.

Whether Cal and its 30-sport, 850-athlete program can continue on its path remains to be seen. It will have to keep increasing its revenue to pay off $445 million in long-term facilities debt and the cost of additional benefits for athletes that could be triggered by Division I governance changes and/or various litigation against the NCAA such as the Ed O'Bannon class-action anti-trust case scheduled for trial starting Monday in U.S. District Court in Oakland.

For now, though, Cal has been able to leverage advantages that schools from one of the six — soon to be five — power conferences have. For example, Cal has been helped immeasurably by the Pac-12's 12-year, $3 billion television contract.

Kansas also has been helped by a new Big 12 TV deal, and earlier this year, it announced a reduction in the student athletics fee, beginning this fall.

Meanwhile, some schools even in not-quite-elite, but-definitely-not-TV-billionaire conferences have been continuing to increase their subsidies of athletics programs. From 2009-10 to 2012-13, Houston — in Conference USA during those years, but now in the American Athletic Conference — has increased subsidies from $17.4 million to $26.1 million. Mountain West member Colorado State has increased subsidies from $13.3 million to $18 million.

Colorado State spokesman Mike Hooker said the school had no comment.

Houston's university chief financial officer Carl Carlucci says "of course, there is concern" within the university's administration about the increasing subsidy — especially since the athletics department has made no progress in paying down an accumulated operating debt of $8 million that has been on the books since 2009. But he points out that Houston's students voted to increase student fees to help pay for a soon-to-be opening, $120 million football stadium that also has drawn $60 million in donations and that the university views as a future money-maker for athletics.

"Our strategy is very much on the revenue side," Carluccci said. "There's a certain amount of spending that you have to incur and the real issue is — well — my impression is, the biggest institutions, they generate a lot of revenue."

PROTEST AT CAL

Cal went from generating $57.2 million in athletics operating revenue in 2009-10 and having $69.3 million in operational spending, to generating $86.9 million in operating revenue 2012-13 and having $90.1 million in operational spending.

The difference is the sum of "hundreds of different things," Wilton says.

But the first one is undeniable. A place where campus protest has been raised to an art form, Cal faced an uproar in 2010 after university support and student fees totaled $7.5 million in 2007-08, then $12.1 million plus a $5.6 million loan in '08-09, then $12.1 million in '09-10.

Two campus task forces — one appointed by then-chancellor Robert Birgeneau, one by the faculty senate — agreed that the subsidy for athletics had to be reduced. The target was a $5 million subsidy by the 2013-14 school year.

A major challenge under the best of circumstances, this was to occur while Cal completed, and began paying for, a $321 million seismic-retrofitting and renovation of its football stadium and the construction of a $153 million athletics training center.

Initially, a big part of the solution was cutting five teams. However, more than $10 million in specifically targeted fundraising pledges saved those teams. Meanwhile, Cal began benefiting from the Pac-12's new TV arrangements.

"Certainly, there are some things that have gone really well for us," Barbour said.

And while undertaking the construction projects, Barbour said, "I think it's widely known that we have not blindly followed the arms race and that there are things that we're just not willing to do, or perhaps you would say we don't have to do because of the pre-eminence of our institution and why people make a decision to come to Cal. … Our facilities, they're fantastic … but they're not over the top. They're not glitzy."

However, Cal's athletics program did start becoming like many others in undertaking business deals the school never had seen before: Selling long-term seat licenses for premium locations in the stadium; negotiating a naming rights contract for the stadium's field; hiring an outside company to help design the seat license program and then adding 15 people to its in-house sales and service staff; leasing space in the stadium to other campus units.

Still other unprecedented moves have come more recently: contracts to host a soccer match between European club powers Real Madrid and Inter Milan on July 26 and moving a home football game this season against Oregon from Memorial Stadium to the San Francisco 49ers' new Levi's Stadium; allowing weddings and other special events to be held in the stadium.

"We have to be paying attention every day — every minute of every day," said Barbour, who is well aware that the $445 million in facilities debt — while under control for now at $18 million a year — will remain an issue for decades. "John and I probably see each other far more than we want to, but … intercollegiate athletics is a very powerful and valuable contributor to the vibrancy of any campus — certainly this campus — and it is worthy of institutional support. … The question becomes, OK, what is that number? And that's one that all campuses struggle with — what is that number?"

At Kansas, another of the power-conference schools, the struggle ended up in the hands of chancellor Bernadette Gray-Little. After KU's 2012-13 financial report to the NCAA showed $93.1 million in total operating revenue and a $13.4 million operating surplus, the university's Student Senate pressed for a decrease in the already relatively low athletics fee, and Gray-Little accommodated the request.

"We discussed this issue with the students and with athletics a number of times," she said. "I think it was the case that reducing the fee was not going to be crippling to athletics. … If athletics had been broke, would we have made the same decision? Probably not, and I doubt that the students would have asked for the reduction."

HOUSTON'S PROBLEM

Houston's students, in the winter of 2012 overwhelmingly voted in favor of a $50 per semester fee increase, $45 of which is being put toward the football stadium and a renovation of Hofheinz Pavilion, the school's basketball arena. The result was a $3.4 million increase in the athletics department's subsidy total.

But in 2012-13, the university added to that, as well.

University CFO Carlucci said the school's exit from Conference USA involved a $3.35 million fee that the university covered. Absent the exit fee, the university's contribution to the athletics program would have declined from $16.9 million in 2011-12 to just under $15 million in 2012-13.

The increase in university support related to the exit fee might have been less problematic if Houston's conference destination had remained the one it envisioned when it announced its departure from Conference USA in December 2011. That didn't happen, however. In November 2012, the Big East that Houston thought it was joining saw Louisville and Rutgers announce their departures for the Atlantic Coast Conference and Big Ten, respectively. Basketball-only members such as Georgetown and Villanova later voted to leave, and they negotiated to take the Big East name with them.

This school year, Houston began competing in the nascent American Athletic Conference, which will be generating substantially less revenue for Houston than the school had anticipated it would be receiving from the former Big East, Carlucci said. To help offset that, while construction of the new football stadium proceeded, the school made a comprehensive facilities-management agreement with an outside, private company — Aramark. The company, according to spokesman David Freirich, is taking over event operations, booking and ticketing; maintenance; food and beverage programs and retail merchandising at all of the school's athletics facilities. The goal, said Carlucci, is to turn them into "entertainment venues … producing a revenue stream for athletics.

"I don't think anybody has a partnership quite like this one," he added. "Even before the stadium opens, they've started (booking) in events."

Ultimately, though, Carlucci knows that an outside management company can be only part of Houston's plan to lower its subsidy for athletics and begin recovering the debt owed by athletics.

He got a reminder last November, when Houston's Student Fees Advisory Committee recommended approval of the athletics department's fiscal 2014-15 request for the same $4.4 million in fee money that the department received for 2013-14. In its annual memo to university president Renu Khator and vice president for student affairs Richard Walker, the committee wrote it "would like to see an increased emphasis on development activities and season ticket sales. We believe it is imperative for the success of (the) department to seek revenue sources from outside the university."

Carlucci said that is supposed to happen.

"I guess to summarize, the AD (Mack Rhoades) is telling us that they will win more games and sell more tickets, and that's part of the plan with the new stadium. And my development officer (vice president for university advancement Eloise Stuhr), she's telling me that they'll make more friends and raise more money. And that we'll find out."

Asked what happens if those things don't happen, there was a long pause before Carlucci responded.

"We ask that for every business: What happens if things don't work?" he said. "And at that point, the plan has to be re-visited, but right now we're working on making the plan work."