"Womens sports drain $$$ from mens sports." Uh, no. Hello, UCONN! Both NCAA winners!

[CTyankee]

BIG celebration in Hartford today! Both basketball teams exceptional!

Fabulous repudiation of the oft repeated lament that women's sports take resources away from the men. But we know now how lame that is! Both teams persevered and WON!

[Jenoch]

1. Title IX has caused the demise of many

college men's sports. Because football is included, many other men's sports, such as wrestling, have been dropped.

[DURHAM D]

3. Title IX is used as an excuse

to drop the so-called Olympic sports for men (to concentrate funds on football and basketball) and still today very few colleges are actually in compliance with Title IX as the women are still screwed over.

First comply with Title IX and then you can worry about the lesser men's sports.

[Jenoch]

5. There is nothing in my post that is not true.

[WinkyDink]

29. Except everything, and poor logic, to boot.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/post/has-title-ix-now-40-years-old-harmed-male-athletics/2012/06/14/gJQArSCqdV_blog.html

[Are_grits_groceries]

4. These sports can be funded.

Unless a school has some budgetary law, the university can fund these programs apart from relying on football money. They choose to pit them all against one another.

[Jenoch]

6. Instead of increasing the number of female

athletes by adding female sports, the colleges cut men's sports in their attempts to comply with Title IX.

[WillyT]

7. And That's Wrong ???

I'm sorry... I thought it was all about the "Student-Athelete"...

Whey if you can only fund so many sports equally, what's the problem?

[Jenoch]

10. The number of football players

should be taken out of the equation. Football is the primary revenue source for college athletics but the high number of players scews the attempt to comply with Title IX. I was a college wrestler, so I have a strong opinion about this.

[WillyT]

12. So Why Screw Over Women's Sports And Title IX ???

Sounds like your sport, and women's, gets screwed over by Men's Football.

[Jenoch]

14. Football FUNDS women's and the smaller men's sports.

iFootball does not 'screw them over'. That is why the number of football players should not be included in Title IX calculations.

[WillyT]

15. I Understand That... That's Why College Athletics Is All Out Of Whack...

If it were really about the "Student-Athlete" an "Amateur Sports", no one would give a shit, there wouldn't be football/basketball coaches being paid MILLIONS of dollars to coach "Amateur" sports, and everybody could be playing for the love of sports as they attain their academic degrees... right ???

[Jenoch]

18. Your last sentence describes small college athletics.

My nephew is graduating from a Division III college where he was a First Team All-Conference nose tackle three years in a row (2nd team his freshman year). They don't receive scholarships in Division III.

[rurallib]

28. why oh why does any team need 88 players on scholarship

when they can only play 11 at a time?
Football has been untouchable for so long. Every university president is scared of the football program.

I would be in favor at a minimum reducing the colleges to 44 scholarships and returning to single substitution rules.

That would help balance things.

[WinkyDink]

30. Well, TFB. Who made YOUR sports the default position? Not demographics.

[whathehell]

11. When women went into the workforce, they started "competing"

for jobs formerly held by men. Does this cause you to believe we should all go back

to the kitchen?

[xmas74]

21. I know a college wrestling coach.

He'd argue with you.

The reason why sports like wrestling are being dropped is money, pure and simple. It has nothing to do with Title IX and everything to do with marquee sports. Schools make more money off of football and basketball than anything else. The clear majority of funding goes to those two programs with funding used for things like new facilities, uniforms, travel, and salaries. The top coaching salaries at any college/university will be for either football or basketball. In some of the smaller schools, the women's coaches are often instructors. (I know of one small college with a very good women's soccer program where the coach was also a psych professor.)

I know a men's wrestling coach and a women's bowling coach. Both will tell you the same thing: football and basketball make more money for universities while sports like wrestling do not. The funding is used for programs that will, in the long run,make the university more money.

[Jenoch]

24. I know a college wrestling who would disagree with your wrestling coach.

Of course it's about money, but it's also about Title IX.

[LittleBlue]

2. More correctly, every other sport drains $$$ from football and sometimes men's basketball

At most universities, football funds every other sport (sometimes men's basketball pulls its own weight) for both men and women.

Which makes me wonder what will happen when football players unionize and demand their fair cut. Sadly, it will mean bye bye to many of these other sports. Not the UConn women though, they're popular and fun to watch.

[Igel]

8. That disproves "women's sports always drain $$$ from men's sports."

You'd have to show that in the general case women's sports don't drain $$$ from men's sports.

First you'd have to figure out what the right amount of $$$ going to men's sports is. Everybody assumes his/her definition of "fair" is the only one that could possibly exist. That makes discussion and reasoning difficult, because immediately the entire issue is moral and fought with religious fervor.

My take is that the right amount is to take the total university funding in $$$ / # of athletes. Then divvy it up by headcount. That's the university student's mandatory buy-in and it's "fair" in a heavy-handed way. Dollar-for-dollar spending. At the same time I'd require that the school evenly publicize intermural and intramural sports to both sexes and make the exception to evenly distribute money to the intermural sports teams.

Any money generated by a sports team is to be posted against the expenses incurred by that team. Any above that is to be placed in an escrow account for years when there is a shortfall. This can be difficult in cases where the money generated isn't produced within athletics itself--for example, if a NCAA win produces a spike in emblematic wear sold by the student store or the licensing dept. Perhaps they can pay some % royalties.

Money donated specifically for a sport isn't included in the calculation, either. I donate money for women's soccer or men's swim, that's also above and beyond the university funding. By the same token, if I donate money for a new gym or new stadium, it's also not included.

Not sure what to do with the fundraising halo effect, increased alumni donations to the general fund when a team wins.

Title IX, however, was something like "money or participation." The interpretation was that meeting either criterion was sufficient, and equal amounts of $ spent was the easier of the two. Men's intermural gymnastics and swim was terminated and additional women's sports were instituted the year I started grad school and the school came into $-for-$ alignment. The Title IX people were happy because it made for equal # of dollars spent. The school filed the paperwork responding to the agency's formal objections and how to come into compliance and waited. Then 2-3 years later, after the school was apparently in full compliance, they were told by some bureaucrat that they weren't. The interpretation shifted. The federal administration decided that in any given instance it could choose which criterion to apply, equal $ or equal hours of participation. The law became, in implementation, "money and participation" and men's sports had to be curtailed when an all-out campaign to get more female bodies on the IM fields failed. That sounds strange, so I'll add a few sentences about that.

In the dorms "we men" (not me--I hate sports, intramural or mural) were waiting for intramural signups. They kept checking the bulletin boards. Then at a hall meeting women's sports were pushed. Women coaches showed up to recruit women. Women on teams showed up. They'd get weight room time, if needed. Showers. Towels. Drinks during practice. They'd have decent practice times, afternoon, evenings; men would practice 10 pm or 6 or 7 am. There were posters on the walls and on the bulletin boards advertising try outs. Posters were up at kiosks all over campus and ads in the student paper. Every dorm resident got a notice in his/her mailbox. Women's try outs were at 8 and 9 am on Friday, 9 and 10 am on Saturday and Sunday morning and at some time Saturday afternoon.

Friday night after dinner a sign was taped up at the front desk. Men's tryouts were at 7 am the following morning. That was it for publicity. There'd be no shower time, no weight room, no towels, no drinks for the teams.

Enough men showed up at their one try out time, on short notice, to more than staff twice the number of teams they had planned. So most men didn't make the cut. Some of the men's sports teams then wound up being suspended before the first practice because those sports didn't get enough women showing up at their 7 try out times, fully publicized, to fully staff the corresponding women's team. Women's turn-out dictated men's participation.

The solution, Title IX, is also a problem. But it's also a symbol, and symbols are also fought over unreasoningly.

[CTyankee]

17. Look, women were fully able and willing to take this on and staff a team.

They did it. They had a coach that was charismatic and not demeaning to them. They were encouraged and they DID it, year after year.

STILL, you have a problem?

For many years women didn't have the sports privileges that men had. And now there is whining about them winning? The men won, too! I say, great! Let's have MORE women's successes and maybe we'll have MORE men's successes!

[malaise]

9. Awesome

Celebrate

[SheilaT]

13. In reality, most football programs cost

more money than they bring in. The high salaries for coaches, the scholarships, the travel expenses. There's this enormous pretense that football makes money, but it generally is not true.

As for the notion that alums donate if their school has a good football program also doesn't seem to be true. The schools that have the highest rates of alumni giving are not the big football schools, but almost entirely small liberal arts colleges, where the emphasis is on actual education, not circuses, I mean sports.

[CTyankee]

19. And I appreciate that. I was making a comparison of a state university school not smaller private

liberal arts colleges. My husband went to U. of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and I went to Carnegie-Mellon University.

Obviously, this whole student-athlete thing is crazy now. I'm even wondering how much it is being played out in the Ivy League. I live in New Haven and I often wonder what the influence is of having a winning football team is when students are being recruited. The Ivy League doesn't award sports scholarships but there are, of course, ways...

[Jenoch]

20. Most of the Division I football programs make hundreds of thousands of dollars

if not millions. Universities are competing to join the Big Ten because they have their own CATV channel which brings in millions of dollars a year in net income. Thia coming season the Big Ten will have 14 football teams (Penn State, Nebraska, Rutgers, and Maryland are the four additional teams).

[SheilaT]

25. That's the myth.

That Division I football makes money.

Look at this link: http://espn.go.com/ncaa/revenue

Some schools do make money on football. Some break even. Others are millions of dollars in the red.

What's really galling is that in many schools students are required to pay fees into the program and can't always get tickets. Or they're seated in really crappy seats. My younger son went to the smallest of the Division I schools, and he complained bitterly that over the four years he attended school, they moved the student section into a worse and worse part of the stadium. That part of his university experience soured him on ever wanting to donate to the school, which is too bad, because it is a pretty good school and he got a pretty good education there.

[Jenoch]

27. I do know that the Big Ten is not a myth.

I did not see any of the Big Ten schools in the red.

A few years ago the University of Minnesota announced that both the men's and women's tennis programs were being dropped. There was outrage and a fundraising campaign was done to save the programs.

[mythology]

16. Hopefully the graduation rate of the women's team will rub off on the men's team

An 8 percent 6 year graduation rate is an absolute joke.

[DavidDvorkin]

22. More to the point, sports drains money from a university's real purpose.

[CTyankee]

23. I agree with that. The Ivies were right in that judgment...

[exboyfil]

26. Actually men's sports fund women's sports

I am not lamenting the fact though.

For example at Iowa in 2010 the men's football team sent $4 directly to general athletics. In addition without football you would not have the majority of the $20M from the conference, the $13M from the alumni, or the $5M (probably concession sales etc).

The women's sports cost $11M but brought in $167K. The men's sports cost $25M and brought in $23M (this does not include the $38M mentioned above which should mostly be attributed to the men's sports).

I would frankly like to see big time sports eliminated from the college experience, but you cannot argue that football at large colleges (and in many cases men's basketball) allow a lot of other sports to continue that otherwise would not. It Iowa and Iowa State very little money comes from the students in the form of activity fees. No tuition or state money goes to the programs. At smaller schools this is not the case though. USAToday has a good website showing the financial status of the larger programs:

http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/sports/college/story/2012-05-14/ncaa-college-athletics-finances-database/54955804/1