A Title IX tweak

Help women's and men's nonrevenue sports

In final fractious public meetings last week, the Bush administration's Commission on Opportunity in Athletics signalled the likely end to the unbroken rise of women's participation in college sports since the enactment of Title IX in 1972. The panel, whose recommendations now sit with Secretary of Education Rod Paige , failed to scale back the "substantial proportionality" standard that allows a school to comply with Title IX if roster spots roughly reflect the percentage of women in its student body. But commissioners did call for a range of changes, including new ways to survey interest and count heads, that seem calculated to restore opportunities for men in beleaguered sports such as wrestling while putting the brakes on offerings for women.

In doing so, commissioners fell into the regrettable trap of pitting have-not against have-not, while letting football and men's basketball go on living as large as ever. Administer truth serum to any big-time athletic director, and he'll tell you that sports like wrestling and women's soccer really do conform to the beau ideal of college athletics, while football and men's hoops do not. He'll also confess to the inexcusable waste over which he presides: a men's basketball coach who flies in for a high school recruit's game simply to be seen in the stands; a football team that's put up in a hotel on the eve of a home game, for fear that "distractions" lurk in the dorms. Is it really too much to ask that football players forego mints on their pillows, so wrestlers and women's soccer players can go back to training and quit screaming at each other?

Novelist and former wrestling coach John Irving raised his voice in The New York Times last week, charging that the proportionality standard constitutes a quota system. "Can you imagine this rule being applied to all educational programs -- classes in science, engineering, accounting, medicine or law?" he asked. Of course it never would be, because women are free to enroll in any course they want. But athletics are a special case. Women are physiologically different from men -- a marvelous circumstance that Irving exploits in the plots of his novels -- so they require parallel athletic programs. To establish equivalent ones is precisely not to prescribe quotas, but to make available equivalent opportunities. Irving also said that schools today "go begging" to fill existing women's teams. In fact, colleges still don't recruit women athletes nearly as energetically as they do men. (Setting up a table in the student union during freshman week isn't recruiting.) But for some reason wrestling would rather make common cause with football than with women's sports. Coming soon: The Fraternity House Rules.

There is a solution. Reduce spending on the most extravagant sports, then use the savings to promote opportunities for women and men. A simple first step would be to dock football programs 15 to 20 scholarships, thereby saving hundreds of thousands of dollars. NFL teams carry 53 players; there's no reason a Division I-A team needs 100 or more, 85 of them on free rides. Far from suffering, college football would actually improve. For all the excitement of last month's Fiesta Bowl, Ohio State and Miami had their benches stocked with players who could have started elsewhere. Scholarship limits would send a better rank of athlete to conference rivals like Indiana and Minnesota, Rutgers and Temple, goosing competition throughout the fall, across the board.

To do this would require no action by the feds, only leadership from the NCAA. And while waiting for that is like waiting for Godot -- past NCAA efforts at passing legislation to cut costs have gone nowhere -- new president Myles Brand claims that education will be his polestar. We can only hope he'll do the necessary arm-twisting so colleges give fewer resources to the two scandal-plagued, big-time entertainments, and more to those sports that put education first.

Alexander Wolff is a senior writer for Sports Illustrated.

 

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