The check isn’t in the mail. At least not yet.

It’s coming, though, and when it does Susan Wachter will be taking it to the bank quickly because the numbers on the check will be at least $6,100,000.

Wachter is the Kansas University athletic department’s chief financial officer. Every June she receives the school’s share of Big 12 Conference and NCAA money. This year it will be more than $6 million.

What that means is Kansas has passed right through $5 million territory because last year’s league and NCAA payment was a paltry $4.8 million. Putting it another way, KU will be receiving a windfall of nearly $1.5 million this year.

“It’s not all gravy,” Wachter stressed.

Still, it brings to mind that old ditty about the Navy getting the gravy and the Army getting the beans. And if Kansas is the Navy, then we could make a case for Fresno State being the Army. How’s that? Well, Kansas receives the big bucks for being in the Big 12 Conference and Fresno State well, let’s just say that if the Big 12 television and bowl package is platinum, then the Western Athletic Conference is tin.

The Big 12 Conference is a big reason why Al Bohl won’t have to pull any hocus-pocus in order to balance the budget at Kansas like he did at Fresno State. Bohl has never denied he diverted funds from the FSU non-operating budget into the operating budget in order to finish in the black. All along, Bohl has contended he did nothing wrong because as many as three audits found no irregularities.

The Fresno State flap is hardly an Arthur Andersen-Enron shenanigan. And yet Fresno State basically fired its business manager and went on a witch hunt for Bohl in the wake of what they described as an impropriety. What would have happened if the Fresno State business manager had stolen a pencil? Would they have docked him two weeks pay?

Meanwhile, although no one is saying, it sure looks like Bohl has sent back the bonus money he earned for balancing the Fresno State budget. Both Bohl and Fresno State officials say the matter has been resolved. How else could they resolve it without Bohl returning the salary bonuses?

That leads to the question of why a school would give an athletic director a bonus for balancing the budget in the first place. That’s part of the AD’s job, isn’t it? At Kansas, Bohl will receive no bonus for a presiding over a balanced budget. Black ink is expected. Maybe that tells us something about Fresno State. Maybe it tells us FSU’s athletic budget is usually so awash in red ink that a balanced budget requires a reward.

Not that Kansas, even with that unexpected $1.5 million from the Big 12, doesn’t have money problems. KU continues to lag behind several conference members in both coaching salaries and in facilities. Playing catch-up costs money.

Take the renovations of Memorial Stadium and Allen Fieldhouse, for example. The KU Athletic Corp. board still owes $21,530,000 on a 15-year bond it negotiated to fund the $27 million-plus it needed to pay for those face-lifts. Six dollars from every KU football and men’s basketball ticket sold through 2013 will be used to pay off that bond. That’s basically one-fifth of every ticket sold.

Some say the outlook for college athletics is gloomy, that balanced budgets during the first decade of the 21st Century will become impossible. Maybe so. Yet the schools in the major conferences like the Big 12 will continue to survive as long as the TV and bowl money continues to take quantum leaps like it did this year.