Originally Posted by goferphan  I don't mean to sound callous but Title IX has done more to hurt college athletics than any other single event in american history.
Some other type of balance needs to be found. The thought that football is the real culprit is very disturbing. If they are going by straight #'s of opportunities, football gobbles up a tremendous amount of opportunities for other men's sports even though they bring in most of the revenue that supports all of the other men's and women's sports. |
If you look at football in relation to participation at the high school level then you may find it less disturbing. There isn't another sport that comes close to the number of high school participants in football, at over one million. It is important to remember that "big time" Division 1A schools make up only 7% of the total NCAA membership. It makes a convenient scapegoat to divert attention from the real issue, but little else. And that schools without football have also been forced to drop programs to meet the gender quota.
The bigger issue is trying to shoehorn high school athletic participation rates that are about 60% male into college programs on campuses that are approaching 60% female nation-wide by using a strict gender quota as the means of complaince. The situation is even worse at HBCUs.
There is no valid correlation between gender ratios and interest. When the OCR attempted to allow surveys of interest to be used as a measure of complaince it was met with opposition from the WSF and NWLC, the same groups who claim that interest in participation is supposedly one measure of compliance.
Please note that the problem isn't with title ix, the problem is with the policy interpretation.