Spending money on sports won't guarantee a college winning teams, more revenue, or a better reputation, according to a report released on Thursday by the National Collegiate Athletic Association.

"Expanded athletic programs appear to be neither the road to riches nor the road to financial ruin," write the authors of the report, Robert E. Litan, Jonathan M. Orszag, and Peter R. Orszag of Sebago Associates, an economic-consulting firm. Increased spending on football and men's basketball is not correlated with increases in winning percentages or net profits for those teams, nor with levels of alumni giving or average SAT scores at a college as a whole, they found.

However, the report does not take a position on many of the most important financial issues facing college athletics directors. Among those are whether colleges are engaged in an "arms race" -- spending more money on sports to keep up with their rivals -- and whether increased spending on football and men's basketball leads to greater alumni giving or better test scores among students.

Nonetheless, Myles Brand, the NCAA's president, said Thursday that the report should force college presidents, trustees, and faculty members to reconsider the amount of money their institutions spend on sports.

"This will help lower the expectations and constrain future growth if presidents and institutions, including faculty, think it's in the best interests of the university to spend financial assets in a different way," said Mr. Brand, a former president of the Indiana University System.

Spending on football and men's basketball rose exponentially from 1992-93 to 2000-1, the main years considered in the study on which the report is based. Furthermore, spending increased much more quickly at colleges that already spent a lot of money. At the 90th percentile of total outlays, colleges were spending 46 percent more on football in 2000-1 than they were in 1992-93. At the 10th percentile, colleges were spending only 33 percent more in 2000-1 than in 1992-93.

However, spending more money on football seemed to correlate with a slight decrease in winning percentage, according to another section of the report.

A $1 increase in expenditures was correlated with a $1 increase in revenue across the board in sports, the authors found. That means that colleges are not realizing new profits by increasing spending on sports, they said.

However, Peter Orszag said, colleges may be experiencing a "flypaper effect": Athletics directors are reinvesting increased profits in their own programs, thus minimizing the profit that is actually reported.

The question of the existence of an arms race remains unproved, according to the authors. They could not correlate a rise in expenses at one institution with equivalent jumps at its rivals in a given conference, but the report speculates that an arms race could be taking place in sports-facility construction.

Spending on construction and capital projects was not included in the study, despite a huge increase in the number of such projects across the country. Most Division I-A programs, for example, have expanded their stadiums and renovated their weight rooms, training facilities, and athletes' academic centers to attract high-profile recruits and thereby win more games.

The authors also could not prove or disprove any relationship between increased expenditures on football and men's basketball and increased expenses on other sports, increased "measurable academic quality," or increased alumni giving.

By combining data from colleges' gender-equity reports with other data in the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System collected by the U.S. Department of Education, the authors also compared football and basketball spending and winning percentages with alumni giving, average incoming SAT scores, and acceptance rates. The researchers found no relationship among any of those variables.