In 2011, the University of Michigan athletic department employed 253 people, according to state records. Four years later, in 2015, it was 334, up 32 percent.

During that period, the average salary grew 22.4 percent, to $89,851. Over a seven-year span, the number of athletic department employees making six figures went from 30 to 81.

Michigan is hardly unique. It's on par with its peers. Critics point to the salaries of big-name coaches, but it's everything that is growing in college sports.

It's the National Collegiate Industrial Complex.

Soaring media rights and vast new revenue streams continue to flood department coffers. Like any good non-profit bureaucracy, they have deftly figured out how to spend … mostly on themselves.

Michigan didn't add 32 percent more sports in those four years, or 32 percent more scholarship athletes, requiring 32 percent more staffing.

It just made about $30 million more dollars per year, from $122.7 million in 2011 to $152.5 million in 2015. Most of the increase came courtesy of the Big Ten Network.

So it spent the money: on new workers and new raises and more assistant directors and more construction and additional private plane flight hours and the gold plating of everything.

On Tuesday, SportsBusinessDaily reported the Big Ten is close to agreeing to a six-year deal with Fox Sports for half its television rights. It would pay about $250 million per year, or $17.9 million per school. And that's just half the deal. CBS and ESPN will pay handsomely to split the rest.

This report comes a little over a week after the NCAA agreed to an eight-year, $8.8 billion extension with CBS and Turner to broadcast the men's basketball tournament. It brings the annual value of the event from $786 million to $1.1 billion, an increase of $314 million per year.

That's new money. That's found money. That's money that has yet to be used or allocated.

It's the same as the college football playoff generating about $470 million in revenue that didn't exist three years ago. Or conference-owned cable television channels hauling in hundreds of millions. The SEC Network, which launched in August 2014, doled out $455.8 million in fiscal 2015, $31.2 million per school. The New York Times predicted last year that Big Ten Network revenue would soon exceed $40 million per school, per year.

All of this money – namely all of this brand-new money that isn't even needed – ratchets up cries to share it with the student-athletes.

That's the exact kind of black/white wedge issue however that college sports executives' love. It's so complicated, so all or nothing, so emotionally charged that they can use it to stall any progress or let the entire debate get bogged down in nonsense.

They can turn Marxist and note wrestlers work just as hard as football players. They can throw up their hands at Title IX. They can form another subcommittee and stage February meetings somewhere warm.

And they can hire another 100 people and refurbish their corner office. Or build an entirely new one, because, you know, it's good for recruiting or something. They can spend every penny so they don't actually have any left and then cry poverty (generally less than 20 athletic departments nationally turn a "profit" each year).

A lot of them still hit actual students up for athletic fees, because college isn't expensive enough.

Very few coaches, administrators or staffers get into college athletics because they think they'll make lots of money. They are well meaning and love college athletics and college athletes. These are often talented, driven people. There are easier ways to earn a living than college sports, with their late nights and jammed weekends. Yet there are piles of gold now and not just for top coaches.

So maybe before everything boils down to simply, "Will you pay the players?" – still a reasonable argument, mind you – college leaders could start by doing something easier … listening to them.

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The stories of spring 2016 in college sports have revolved around two things: all that additional money and more rulings and decisions that treat the players with little respect.

Forever and ever, everything in college athletics has been filtered from the top down – votes, policy, even media coverage comes via the prism of administrators, coaches, commissioners and presidents.

Story continues