A small link on the Colorado State University athletics Web site has created a big legal headache for the school.

New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo has subpoenaed CSU, along with 39 other schools, to get more information on a deal with a student-loan provider called Student Financial Services.

CSU spokesman Brad Bohlander said the school's staff is looking through documents and materials to determine the nature of the relationship with the lender, and "we should know more (Thursday)."

He said the school "is taking this seriously, and we’ll participate in any investigation."

Cuomo has been looking into the relationship between colleges and loan providers, questioning whether students are getting independent advice from their schools. He’s found relationships where schools or their employees get referral fees or other "kickbacks," as he calls them, for sending students to specific lenders.

They ranged from payments, lobster dinners and DVD players, according to an April Wall Street Journal article, to stock in the loan companies.

The new round of subpoenas, announced today, are a "new chapter" in the Cuomo investigation, he said in a statement.

"Students trust their university’s athletic departments because so much of campus life at Division I schools centers around supporting the home team," Cuomo said in the statement. "To betray this trust by promoting loans in exchange for money is a serious issue."

A Cuomo spokesman didn’t return a message left this afternoon asking for comment.

Cuomo said he found that the athletics director at Dowling College in Long Island, N.Y., put links to Student Financial Services on its Web site, and used its interns to hand out promotional materials. Student Financial Services, doing business as University Financial Services, paid Dowling $75 for each loan application from the athletics department.

Terms of the deal between University Financial Services and CSU aren’t known, but the two have a relationship.

The lender has one of 16 logo links labeled "sponsors/promotions" on csurams.com, the athletics department’s Web site.

A click takes the user away from CSU to a green-and-gold Web site with the heading "Welcome — Go Rams!" Students are told they can consolidate their student loans as part of a "free service — at no cost to you!" The toll-free number is 1-866-1GORAMS, and the site’s URL is csurams.ufloans.com.

The Web site says, "UFS is a proud paying sponsor of Colorado State University Athletics."

Cuomo says he’s looking at how athletics departments "are using school team names, mascots, colors and logos to imply that UFS is the school’s official lender."

A message left on the company’s general voice mailbox after 6 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time was not returned. The company failed to return calls placed earlier in the day by Bloomberg News.

Commercial relationships with athletics departments aren’t unusual. The 16 sponsors on the CSU athletics Web site also include links to a travel agency, a jeweler, a hospital, and a Rams-branded Visa card.

The University of Colorado’s athletics site, CUBuffs.com, has 10 outside commercial advertisements, including links to a CU-branded MasterCard, two real estate Web sites, and a Lasik eye surgery provider. But there’s no student-loan provider among them.

CU is a direct lending school, offering loans directly through the federal Department of Education, rather than through banks. In a question-and-answer page on its financial aid Web site, it says it has "no financial incentive" to grant a loan.

The school has a preferred lender list determined by responses to the school’s questionnaire. CU says it "accepts no payments from lenders, either to be on the preferred list, or to process a loan," and "neither the financial aid office, nor any of the staff, accepts any trips, payments, or gifts from lenders."