The Times has a good piece about the ways that colleges pad their rosters of female athletes to comply with Title IX:
At the University of South Florida, more than half of the 71 women on the cross-country roster failed to run a race in 2009. Asked about it, a few laughed and said they did not know they were on the team.
At Marshall University, the women’s tennis coach recently invited three freshmen onto the team even though he knew they were not good enough to practice against his scholarship athletes, let alone compete. […]
At Cornell, only when the 34 fencers on the women’s team take off their protective masks at practice does it become clear that 15 of them are men.
This is funny:
Division I programs routinely count male players who practice with women’s teams as female participants. According to the Department of Education, they are doing nothing wrong.
The reason schools need so many women is to compensate for the profitable and large (111 man) football squads. I worked at a Division I school for a couple of years, and from my vantage point, the underprivileged football and basketball players who got an education on scholarship were few and far between. For most of them, classes were simply a nuisance to be routed around, and they’d have been better off simply being paid for their four years of service as professional athletes employed by the university franchise.
Davis X. Machina
You can’t expect the NBA and NFL to run their own farm systems, can you? After all, they’re both going broke so fast they need to completely overhaul their labor agreements.
I think having state governments take over the job by broad-based taxation and increased student fees is a fair and equitable response to this crisis.
Some Guy
I have had some terrific student athletes in 14 years of higher ed. teaching, but yeah, I have had plenty who were not particularly interested in education, they were there for the sport. And those inevitably are students on the high attendance sports, football and men’s hockey and basketball. Silly thing is, generally, our teams aren’t very good. The hockey team is different most years, but I get weary of clueless young men giving excuses or being fools about their education. They are taken advantage of and don’t even know it, wasting the most valuable part of their college experience for the sport.
Many do not live out this stereotype in my experience, but plenty do, and it drags on one’s soul as a teacher.
Brian S (formerly Incertus)
It wasn’t until the last couple of years at my current job (which ends after this summer term, by the way) that I had a real animus toward college athletics, but I’m there now, mostly because the state doesn’t value the work I do, but they do value the athletics programs. They can’t find money to give faculty more than a 2% raise one time in the last three years, but they can find $60 million for a football stadium for a school that competes in the lowest echelon of Division 1 football.
And the funny thing is that most of the student-athletes I’ve had over the years are actually decent students, given the demands made on their time and the ridiculous travel schedules some of them are forced to meet. I work with them as much as they need, I make allowances for them, etc. But the negatives of college athletics outweigh what few positives come out of the programs as far as I’m concerned.
Egypt Steve
Could the system be run on the up-and-up if Div. I men’s football were just taken out of the equation?
stuckinred
Anyone want to see the UGA Athletics Digital Magazine? Go Dawgs!
TooManyPaulWs
Brilliant solution to all of this is to have the college football and basketball teams disassociate themselves as collegiate athletics and become minor league teams, with their colleges and universities as “sponsors” promoting said teams.
These minor leagues can then pay the players directly, who can then spend their income if they want as self-paying students if they want an education.
The minor leagues can make a deal with the pro leagues to 1) allow the team unions to sign up the minor league players for representation, 2) allow the minor leagues to keep those players on contract for 4 years, with a provision that a contract can get bought out within 2 years, and 3) teams can then draft players from the minor leagues as they do now with college players (buying out a contract of any player who joins the draft after being in the minors for 2 years).
The players can 1) transfer between teams by demanding to be traded, 2) market themselves within the team’s area of business, 3) open their own chain of BBQ restaurants. MMMmmmm, BBQ…
The existing teams will still exist, just not under the direct control of the universities like they are now. Any money the universities get out of the minor leagues would be merch, ticket sales, vending, etc.
Workable or no?
CA Doc
The scary thing about this scam is how it’s filtered down to middle school. That’s when parents start hiring instructional coaches, make videos of their little star atheletes, send them to expensive camps. The goal apparently is not access to a great education, because all this work and money expended looking for an athletic scholarship could have payed for a year or two of tuition, if that’s what they really wanted.
stuckinred
@Brian S (formerly Incertus): And I’m sure it is constantly pointed out that the football program is NOT part of the institutional budget.
stuckinred
@TooManyPaulWs: What are you, French?
stuckinred
@CA Doc: And that’s the white kids.
Brian S (formerly Incertus)
@stuckinred: They don’t even bother. That would require talking to us as opposed to trying to decertify our union and get rid of tenure (which doesn’t even affect me, as I’m on a year to year contract). This is Florida, after all.
NonyNony
@CA Doc:
I’ve thought about this before – have the universities license their sports teams out as a real farm club setup. The problem with it lies right about here:
There ain’t a university president in the country who would think that was a good deal. Losing control of the school’s name is not something that keeps you in the job.
For the major sports schools – your Floridas, your Ohio States, your IUs, etc – the sports team is an investment to receive alumni dollars and to garner advertising every Saturday to potential students. It’s an advertising tool. And letting someone else have control of the brand when the entire point of the enterprise is to promote that brand is not something a lot of folks would go for.
In some states – my own state of Ohio included – the sports teams are also political tools. Ohio State gets a lot of love from the statehouse – even in bad years Ohio State is consistently better off than the rest of the state universities in this state. Partially this is because so many of the state legislators have some kind of a degree from OSU (many of them graduated from the Law School, for example) but partially this is because the sports teams are very popular and highly associated with the university. Even voters who could give a rat’s ass about education care about Ohio State. OSU wouldn’t want to give up that kind of good PR by spinning off their franchise into other hands.
jon
Meanwhile, men who want to compete in gymnastics, volleyball, and soccer have a harder and harder time finding teams in colleges. Wrestling also suffers.
Football should be taken out of the equation.
Or maybe some college should just challenge the interpretation of Title IX to do just that. Chances are, many Federal judges would say that football just doesn’t count since most women don’t play it so not many women are being denied anything by not having women’s football teams. That there are men who can’t get volleyball scholarships may come into play in such reasoning, but who really knows?
College athletics is a farce, but it really doesn’t have to be.
john walters
The really ironic thing about this is that, for most colleges and universities, football is not a profit center — it’s a money-loser. The rewards for top-level success are huge; a consistently winning football program, like those at Ohio State or Florida, generates enough revenue to underwrite the entire athletic program. And attracts a lot of big-money donors to the school.
But the costs of fielding a team are very high. Schools like Northwestern or Vanderbilt lose quite a bit on football. And I doubt that the likes of Marshall and South Florida are raking in the big bucks.
Really, it makes no sense on any level for colleges and universities to put so much time and effort into big-time sports. And it fosters a fundamentally corrupt culture (latest example: Ohio State) at odds with the supposed values and mission of an educational institution.
Omnes Omnibus
Time for my obligatory plug for D-III schools. No athletic scholarships. Ability to play multiple sports if one chooses. Student-athletes are merely part of the student community. And for those who want, years later, to be able to say that they played college football, schools often have no cut policies so that if you show up for practices, you are on the team ( you might never get a second of playing team, but you will letter as senior).
Fucen Pneumatic Fuck Wrench Tarmal
title 9 is fine, just exclude sports that produce revenue from the head count. oh, and put some oversight(gasp! regulation!) in place to make sure the books aren’t unduly cooked. because the ncaa is a joke in your town.
as the president of florida said at the time of the smu death penalty and subsequent dismantling of the swc as a result, the nuclear option will probably never be used again, because of its after effects, its been open season since.
i recently went to a funeral of someone that had many friends and associates in college football, the funeral procession was the biggest i, and i think the funeral director had ever seen. i know i spent close to 200 dollars on a floral arrangement, the upshot is, coaches and admins from around the country sent so many, that i might as well not have bothered, you would have had to really be looking for mine to have seen it, i can only imagine what they cost those programs.
the person who died, is no one you have heard of, which causes me to conclude that, with flowers on that order of magnitude being sent from so many places this person briefly touched, these programs are spending a ton, in ways you don’t even imagine.
pay the damned players, the education is nice, but if the kids aren’t prepared to use it, then it really isn’t a value, or compensation.
alwhite
I wish I had kept the link but there was a story I read a year or so ago about the finances of college sports. I don’t remember the details, it might have been a half dozen schools or it might be none of them actually make a profit on football. The school subsidizes the program so and “profit” has to be compared to the amount of that subsidy. It was a tangled mess to work through but none of the public U’s made a real profit on football.
I say outlaw scholarships, pay the athletes and stop pretending they are real students. Sure it will end up with a league of giants & everyone else but so what? We have that now & at a greater cost to the schools and to the kids.
Fucen Pneumatic Fuck Wrench Tarmal
@alwhite:
that is more about accounting and how they finagle the budget at the schools. how many donations to the general scholarship fund, or other endowments are football related?
Scott P.
Well, then you get, say, Liberty University wanting to raise its profile, so it buys your favorite university’s football team and relocates them, so that you now have the Liberty University Seminoles or whatever.
DPirate
…and why is that?
Sammy
Paul makes the incorrect assumption that all these football teams ar profitable. The vast majority aren’t. All those bowl games are generally unprofitable for the school involved, too
Georgia Pig
To be more accurate, they’re profitable for certain individuals, including ADs, coaches and other functionaries in the college sports management business. Corporate culture has infected major college sports as well, i.e., the company doesn’t actually have to be successful for it to be great deal for the management. In the NCAA, the system currently benefits from a captive labor pool. If the top players in college hoops were pros, they’d get paid millions, which would mean less money for coaches, ADs and other college sports management. From what I’ve heard talking to lawyers involved in NCAA compliance, the whole house of cards is about to collapse, as there will inevitably be court rulings that will end the NCAA’s ability to enforce amateur status for players.
db
You’re never going to get rid of D-I football. So quick solution is to take it out of equation like Egypt Steve says.
Long term solution is to provide more financing/support at the jr high/high school level for women’s sports.
Iriepirate
I find this post kind of whack, it’s a page out of the Republican’s playbook. Getting down on the strapping young bucks, and their distaste for learning. Football playerz are teh stupid, and all their scholarship money should be used for women’s row teams, cause they actually care about school!!! Er, what?
(UCLA grad here, first to 100 National Champions, and the #1 sports university for Women.)
Davis X. Machina
@Omnes Omnibus: People’s Exhibit 1: The Amherst-Williams football game…
Paul in KY
@Some Guy: A lot of the time, if you fucked around in HS, you just aren’t prepared for college work & you will not be able to keep up.
I think many college athletes fall into this trap.
Paul in KY
@NonyNony: Also, the athletic profits are not taxed, as they can fall under the ‘educational’ non-profit exemption.
jayackroyd
I’ve always wondered whether football actually makes money for most of Division 1. There are huge capital costs in the stadium and the practice facilities, lots of expensive staff.
The scholarships don’t matter, of course. They aren’t foregone revenue.
I’ve posed this question to a couple of people. I’m told the tv revenue for the SEC teams, at least is so huge that they have to be profitable.
But I really do think that a lot of the costs are absorbed as university overhead that should be attributed to football.
John 2.0
This is a pretty one-sided perspective. I was a non-scholarship athlete at a small D-1 school in the 90’s that tried to create two different female varisity sports for title 9 reasons. Neither sport could generate enough interest to sustain the programs. As a direct result the team that I was on (men’s swimming/diving) was discontinued shortly after I graduated. The women’s team was scholarship (the men’s team never recieved any) and continued, but the competitiveness of the women’s team took a nose dive since both men’s and women’s teams practiced together, and no other team in the conference wanted to do have a half-meet.
Of course, none of this prevents the Atheletic department from calling me several times a year for donations.
jayackroyd
However, it may be the case that while football is not itself profitable, it may lead to alumni loyalty that greatly enhances the endowment.
A whole lot of elements of the college experience can be explained if you assume it’s all about the endowment.
http://bit.ly/eZtWEf
Stefan
Brilliant solution to all of this is to have the college football and basketball teams disassociate themselves as collegiate athletics and become minor league teams, with their colleges and universities as “sponsors” promoting said teams.
Why so complicated? Why not just do what baseball does, which is run minor-league teams tied into the major-league clubs, with the colleges having no part of it? College-level baseball isn’t really seen as a way into the major leagues, so it exists more as an opportunity for people who are real students at the school to play.
CJ
It’s interesting that they mention fencing, as Brown is currently poised to obliterate its fencing program that just took 12th at the championships. Even better, the recommendation from their committee bans continuation of the program via donations, so it’s not even a money issue. They plain just don’t feel like dealing with fencing anymore, or women’s skiing or men’s wrestling.
Or, you can choose to believe the rumor that one of their athletic director types wants a womens rugby team and will slash whatever opposition stands in her way.
SeanH
Just de-lurking to to point out that graduation success rates differ wildly among the Div 1-A schools. Some do an excellent job and grad rates are much higher than the general student body and some are absolutely pathetic.
For instance, just sticking with public schools with top-level programs, 85% of Penn St football players and 82% of UCLA basketball players get their degrees. At the same time only 45% of Oklahoma football players and 8% of Maryland basketball players graduate.
/sports nerd
butler
@Stefan: That’s not quite accurate. Tons of college baseball players end up drafted and in the minor and major leagues. There has even been a growing prefence by mlb clubs for college players, because they have spent 3-4 years playing and developing against high level competition, which gives pro teams a better chance to evaluate their talent and saves them the cost of developing them in the minor leagues. Many players do go directly from high school into the minors, but more and more college is seen as the better choice.
College also gives high school players leverage in potential contract negotiations. If they are drafted out of high schol and don’t like the contract offered they can just refuse and go to school. Of course the opposite is true from graduates, since after college they have no leverage agaisnt the contract offers of pro clubs.
adolphus
@John 2.0:
But here is where I am confused. According to this article and Wikipedia (full caveats) one of the possible ways of meeting compliance to Title IX is “Full and effective accommodation of the interest and ability of underrepresented sex.”
This tells me that if your school documented the opportunity provided to women athletes, but they did not take advantage of it, this would keep them in compliance. It would take a good deal of paperwork and documentation, but nothing compared to the paperwork and documentation required to prove NCAA compliance in football/basketball recruitment rules.
And there has been more than enough time since Title IX was enacted for longitudinal studies at American universities in general and specific universities to document relative interests between the genders in intercollegiate sports and meet the requirements that way.
Note the last example in the article where Cal Irvine canceled women’s swimming while beefing up indoor track. Pools are expensive to maintain and are potential revenue producers to rent out to community teams and clubs (and you can’t triple count the players unless you have a synchronized swimming team).
To me what this says is that schools are taking the easier path by cheating and stretching the rules and canceling more expensive sports all in the name of money and not to comply honestly with what has, on balance, been a very good law.
adolphus
@SeanH:
Seems like we only need fear the Turtle in sports. Competing for a job or promotion, not so much.
John 2.0
@adolphus: I’m no expert in Title IX, but that solution was either did not exist in the late 90’s or not explored at the time (or maybe Wiki is wrong, I don’t know). There was also a change in leadership at the school at the time (and this was shortly after I had graduated, so I’m not sure what internal politics were in play).
I’m not being critical of Title XI. I think it is a very good law. My point is that not every school cheats (as the article would seem to imply), and that compliance may actually hurt some female athletes unintentionally, even if this is an extremely rare unintended consequence.
In my particular example I do not believe that cost of facilities was a concern. The school hosted varsity Swimming/Diving, water polo and synch. swimming in the same pool (as well as renting the facilities out to a local club swim team and scuba diving instructors). After the teams were eliminated only women’s swimming/diving and synch. swimming were left (men’s swimming and water polo were eliminated alltogether, rather than be allowed to carry on as a club sport).
And just to butress SeanH’s point, I would like to point out that while I was on the swim team we had the highest average GPA of any D-1 varsity sports team in the Nation.
adolphus
@John 2.0:
I am certainly no expert on this either and you are right that the article does imply that cheating is universal.
But this three prong test is mentioned a lot of places that write on Title IX, so I guess my question or point is broader than a reaction to your post. It sounds to me like if a school provides equal opportunity to female athletes, and can document that, and female students fail to take advantage of that, and you can document that, then you have met one of the possible compliance procedures.
And while the documentation process might be burdensome, so is most of the NCAA compliance paperwork and there is no shortage of social science grad students who could do the longitudinal studies.
The problem of course is football. In order to prove lack of equal interest by females in the appropriate sports, you would have to expend equal energy, time, and money recruiting female athletes as you do football players and that ain’t gonna happen so this might be impossible or difficult to prove/implement so they take easier routes of canceling sports or padding rosters.