The signs are there, as plain as a Penn State helmet. Athletic departments are bleeding money. Budgets are being slashed. Coaches are going on furlough. Sports are being eliminated.

After decades of excess, is the financial meltdown about to bring nuclear winter to college sports?

Citing a slew of improving economic indicators, Newsweek recently declared "The Great Recession" probably is over, though you'd have a hard time convincing any Division I athletic director. Just as with the nation as a whole, the fallout of the 2008 economic downturn is likely to be felt for years and has already begun to change the face of intercollegiate athletics.

As they are forced to reduce their budgets, administrators are left to wonder what might happen if the economy doesn't turn around and schools don't change their free-spending ways.

"Unless we want it to be six or eight programs that just compete among themselves, it is our responsibility to somehow regulate that economic model," said Sandy Barbour, athletic director at the University of California at Berkeley.

Here are some startling facts from a recent NCAA report that detailed spending in major-college athletics:

• Football Bowl Subdivision (formerly Division I-A) programs increased their operating budgets by 11 percent annually, increasing their spending by more than a third from 2004 to 2007.

• Spending on athletics is three to four times higher than the rate of total spending for universities at all Division I schools.

• 19 NCAA institutions made more money than they spent in 2006 in all of Division I. Those 19 are FBS schools. Only six of the programs that made a profit have done so for the past five years.

But their data was compiled largely with numbers crunched before the economy crashed.

"Universities across the country are on the horns of a dilemma," said Dr. William "Brit" Kirwan, chancellor of the University of Maryland system. "We've built this enterprise with an insatiable appetite but we no longer have the revenue to feed it. We're going to have to come to grips with that fact and move to a more rational model."