Framing the impact of COVID-19, Iowa State AD Jamie Pollard used an analogy.

“If we can’t play football this fall, I mean, it’s Ice Age time,” he told reporters in early April. “There is nobody in our industry right now that could reasonably forecast a contingency plan for how they would get through not playing any football games.”

The canceled 2020 NCAA tournament stings athletic departments everywhere, but it need not be a final blow for anyone. However, an interrupted football season would be a disaster according to pretty much every administrator who’s weighed in on the possibility.

That’s because football is the gravy train that feeds everything else in college sports. And football’s load has been heavy since the beginning.

From the late 1800s, football financed not just every other sport, but the growth of schools themselves.

In 1929, the Carnegie Foundation visited colleges nationwide and dropped a 383-page report that covered college sports’ growth before and after the turn of the century.

“Commercialism has made possible the erection of fine academic buildings and the increase of equipment from the profits of college athletics,” the report said, while noting how weird it was the players driving that growth were not officially compensated.

The report made clear that “athletics” really meant “football” when it broke down finances at dozens of schools for either 1926 or ‘27. In one year, Alabama made $150,000 in revenue on athletics, and $72,000 came from football ($60,000 of that from one Rose Bowl). Cal’s athletic revenue was $486,162, with football chipping in $457,016. Harvard’s athletic profit was $131,000, with football revenue coming in at $429,000.

“Football,” the Carnegie authors wrote, “carries the bulk of the monetary burden.”

By the end of the Great Depression, plenty of people in higher education wanted to kill football off. They realized they couldn’t.

For much of the 20th century, academic leaders worried about football turning schools away from their missions. You could see it in fretting about the over-commercializing of the sport due to bowl games, even when there was just one bowl. You could see it when Tulane’s president kneecapped his football team in the name of academic purity in the 1950s.

But today, bowls are everywhere, and Tulane still plays FBS football. The reason academia didn’t stop football is that, by the end of the Depression, it was clear what stopping football would mean. In November of 1929, the Big Ten commissioner said this:

Those who charge college athletics are commercialized think only in terms of football. Football is the only one of 14 intercollegiate sports that has any considerable earning power, and actually supports the remaining 13. This raises the question of whether we should condemn sports that have earning power solely because of this earning power, and should stress only the sports that lack earning power, simply because they have no appreciable earning power.

The Big Ten held out on bowl games for a while. Then it gave in, and now bowls contribute seven figures to the coffers of each Big Ten school every year.

As the 20th century rolled on, football only became more of a financial cornerstone.

In 1951, Michigan State football made a $264,000 profit. MSU’s men’s basketball team made $33,865. Every other sport lost money, and the athletic department as a whole lost $80,873, the Associated Press reported. The football profit would’ve been greater if the school hadn’t retired stadium bonds (used for a recent enlargement of the stadium) and re-sodded the field at a cost of nearly $9,000.

In 1974, the Atlanta Journal published financial figures for 15 Southern athletic departments. All of them profited on football, with LSU, Alabama, and Tennessee each clearing $1 million after expenses. All 15 lost money on non-football sports, with several finishing 1972-73 in the red overall. Tennessee posted $1.1 million in football profit and a $23,686 department-wide loss.

In 1984, the Supreme Court took control of TV rights away from the NCAA and let schools and conferences negotiate their own deals. The schools wanted to make their own deals for football broadcasts, specifically.

With TV, football became even more of a meal ticket for entire athletic departments.

In 2018, LSU’s athletic department reported $145 million in revenue to the NCAA. Of that, LSU reported $87 million came from football. But that doesn’t tell the whole story. LSU also reported $39 million from media rights, the result of the SEC’s negotiations with ESPN and CBS. The athletic department only credited $12 million of that to football, even though anyone in college sports would tell you the vast majority of CBS’ interest in the SEC was football-based.

Football’s real contribution was well over $100 million of LSU’s $145 million in total athletic money. But even going by LSU’s accounting, football made $55 million in profit. Men’s basketball and baseball, together, added a little less than $1 million. Everything else lost money, but thanks to football, the department still made about $8 million.

The situation is similar at schools that don’t have blue-blood football teams. Take Kansas, probably the school with the widest gap between its men’s basketball team (consistently in the top five) and football team (one of FBS’ worst). In 2018, the hoops team brought in $16 million in ticket sales, compared to $4 million for football. But football had $34 million in total revenue, compared to $19 million for hoops, because Kansas was honest and credited most of its Big 12 media money to the football column.

The only schools where football isn’t financial king are small ones that don’t have big TV deals but do have another sport with tons of tradition. For example, in 2018, North Dakota’s not-great FCS football team posted $1.7 million in revenue, less than a men’s hockey team that sold $4.2 million in tickets and makes frequent postseason runs.

If you think football has too much financial influence on American college life, that’s understandable. It’s just not new.

In fact, it was that way from the start.