There is no actual revenue (ticket, parking and merchandise sales; NCAA distributions; media revenues, et al) in Track and Field. What they are counting are donations and funds from the school and the athletic department allocated to support the sport. By being under budget they show a "profit". The only way they could run a true profit is if donations and endowed scholarship money is greater than the operating budget.

The numbers are inflated by removing the proportion of Athletic Department overhead budget (administrative costs, people dedicated to compliance and other roles that spend time overseeing the sport, plus interest payments on facilities, etc) from the sport expenses. Mind you this is less for minor sports, but still a chunk of the expenses not counted on the ledger.

The numbers are further fudged by presuming the school would be unable to fill vacant slots with non-athletes, even though virtually every FBS school turns away qualified in state students in order to sell seats to foreign students (meaning they have replacements in hand ... in the case of the University of California campuses over 40,000 such qualified students are turned away).

So it's a lot of funny accounting going on to show a profit for sports that sell no tickets and derive no media revenue. When the Department wants to tout their success they point to the dog and pony show profit, but when the budget cannot be balanced (i.e., the Institution says we are not giving you an extra $1m to cover your shortfall this year) then the show profit vanishes and the sport is axed immediately. Clearly they keep two books (maybe three at shadier operations).

If schools had their druthers they'd just have Football and Men's Basketball as compensated sports and drop all the others, as they are really window dressing.