If you’ve ever shaken your head at the sight of a luxury car conked out on the side of the road while plodding past in an economy model, perhaps you can relate to some of the curious headlines in college athletics these days.

Ones that read that UCLA and Ohio State athletic departments, among many others, are running in the red financially.

While the University of Hawaii and its peers in the conferences of more limited means annually struggle to keep the tide of deficits below knee level, some of the much more well-heeled have managed to go waist or neck deep.

The Bruins piled up an $18.9 million deficit for 2018-19 and California $24 million, according to the San Jose Mercury News. Ohio State was $624,359 in the red, the Columbus Dispatch reported. (UH’s deficit was $2.9 million, according to the most recent audit).

UCLA and Ohio State are the latest blue blood public athletic programs — and among the most eye-opening — serving as examples of the increasingly broken model that is college athletics.

This is an enterprise where it is possible for some schools to take in $100 million-$200 million a year and yet still manage to spend their way into a deep hole.

It is an industry in which schools, through their hiring mistakes, are on the hook paying some coaches handsomely to leave their schools while they are anteing up even more to bring on new ones. All the while slapping up newer, more dazzling facilities in a frantic money-draining arms race.

Not surprisingly, according to the most recent NCAA study, just 29 of the 130 schools that comprise the NCAA’s Football Bowl Subdivision, where UH competes, generated more revenue than expenses.

“I think the number of schools that are struggling to break even is symptomatic of this escalating arms race,” UH President David Lassner told the Star-Advertiser editorial board. “I think one of the things (athletic director) David Matlin has done exceptionally well is not fall into this trap. I mean, when our football coach (Nick Rolovich) was offered a five-fold (deal of his $600,004 salary by Washington State last month) we didn’t … we’re (just) not going to counter that.”

The even more recent example of Colorado coach Mel Tucker going from Colorado to Michigan State and doubling his $2.67 million salary, Lassner said, “It is nuts, sorry. That’s what’s broken.”

And some schools, including Rutgers and Cal, with strings of double-digit deficits, are notorious for the runaway losses incurred annually.

But Ohio State and UCLA are notable because they have largely been exceptions. They are in the industry’s upper crust, often with a wide range of successful teams, lucrative revenue streams and long histories of operating in the black.

The Bruins, for example, signed the richest apparel deal in college athletics four years ago, $280 million over 15 years, and last reported a deficit 15 years ago.

The Buckeyes have one of football’s largest seating capacities, 104,944, and The Horseshoe, as Ohio Stadium is known, has had a string of sellouts for 45 of the past 46 years and last ran in the red a decade ago.

They also rake in the big bucks from TV and media deals and bowl agreements. Most Big Ten schools received $51 million each from conference distributions (Rutgers and Maryland got lesser shares as newer members). Pac-12 members averaged nearly $30 million. By comparison, UH’s TV deal was worth $2.6 million.

If UCLA and Ohio State, with all they would seem to have going for them, have difficulty balancing the bottom line, the prospects of the current model being sustainable for public institutions aren’t promising.

Reach Ferd Lewis at flewis@staradvertiser.com or 529-4820.