Is a focus on sports hindering our academic growth?

	Do girls succeed in the classroom because fewer of them play sports than boys do? AP
	MAILBAG Frank Deford will periodically answer questions from SI.com users in his mailbag. Your name: Your e-mail address: Your home town: Enter your question:

By now all our schoolboys and schoolgirls are back in the little red schoolhouses, studying diligently. Well, the schoolgirls are.

Books have been written, such as The War Against Boys, to suggest that American schools are set up to favor girls, and there's even talk that we need affirmative action to help these intellectually handicapped boys .. or, if not, we're going to end up with an American society of egg-headed executive women and ham-headed worker men -- where the gals do all the heavy thinking while the guys come home from their jobs flipping burgers and spend their downtime playing video games and watching poker and arena football on TV.

This fall, 58 percent of the U.S. college population will be female, and more women stay in college and more apply all the time. When this freshman class graduates in 2010, the Department of Education estimates that as many as three out of every five diplomas will go to women.

Now, there are a lot of reasons that might account for this, including the dread possibility that the so-called weaker sex may be, well, simply smarter than we dim brutes. But I certainly think that at least some of this scholastic imbalance may be accounted for by the fact that from an early age, boys are directed toward sports and rewarded more for their athletic prowess than for their classroom work. For boys, Readin', 'Ritin' and 'Rithmetic have been replaced by a new set of three R's: Runnin', Reboudin' and let's go to da Replay.

It isn't, either, just that classic inner-city delusion where little boys bet their futures on becoming great, multimillionaire sports superstars. No, in our middle classes all too many parents push children to excel in sports so that their child might win a college athletic scholarship. This is the cockeyed system we've developed in the U.S., wherein the free road to a college education is through a tennis court or a soccer field, while someone more accomplished in the school classroom has a harder time getting to the college classroom.

How else do colleges desperately try to attract more males? Well, even for those geeks who can't play a sport, more and more colleges offer sports-management courses. Yessir, we are going to have the best-run sports franchises in the world.

Another desperate admissions ploy is for small colleges to field football teams. It's much the costliest sport around, but football is a game played virtually only by men, so that helps to desperately inflate that shrinking male college ratio.

Well, there is one hope for us guys. Because of Title IX, more and more girls are being introduced to sports, and studies show that female athletes eventually start to act like their male colleagues. That is, their grades go down and they lose interest in other campus activity.

Here's our chance, men. Don't protest Title IX. Support it. Get those little girls away from their homework and out on the playground, with us. It may be our only hope to keep running America in the style to which we fellas are accustomed.

Top Photo Galleries Top 10 Stories in Baseball for 2009 Orlando Magic Dancers NFL Cheerleaders: Week 16 Tweets of the Week 2000s: Top 10 Goalie Masks

Most Popular Stories Cardinals up ante in Holliday derby Colts' owner Irsay approved move to pull starters Texas Tech fires head football coach Mike Leach Crosby, Brodeur, Niedermayer top Team Canada's roster Ochocinco: Revis can't cover me 'in a phone booth'