they can afford a football program?

screw 'em.

Disgraceful University of Wisconsin (Madison) is unable to support a baseball program, the only Big Ten team without one. Title IX was to blame for this one, but it doesn't have to be this way.

Title IX was to blame for this one

########. Football is to blame for this one. Football teams don't need 85 scholarships. They could operate just fine on 50, and that would be more than enough to balance the resources for women's sports. College football is out of control.

Before anyone makes the argument that football and basketball should be exempted from Title IX considerations since they make money necessary to support the rest of the athletics department, the NCAA can't make this claim in court. (This is aside from the question of whether or not football actually makes money at most schools.) When the NCAA and Citadel were sued by Nick Buoniconti's son to try to get them to cover the medical costs incurred after he broke his neck playing football, the defendants made the shameful argument that they weren't required to do so, because Buoniconti wasn't an employee of the school. He was merely engaged in a recreational pastime. The court should never have bought this line of ########, but it did. In order to sustain it, the NCAA had to swear under oath that making money is IN NO WAY a concern of intercollegiate athletics. Had they admitted that generating revenue is something they care about AT ALL, then the athletes would be employees, and they would have to be treated as such.

The NCAA can get football and basketball exempted from Title IX considerations any time its wants to. All it has to do is to admit the obvious reality that making money is a consideration, and treat the athletes as employees. It will never take this step. So, train your fire somewhere other than on Title IX.

It's a tangential point to what JMN said, but both my school and CSU Fullerton dropped football a while back, within a couple of years of each other. And for the same reason: to save money, since football was a money loser. Since then I assume that at both campuses, the baseball team has the best total attendance of any NCAA sport. Which isn't to say that times aren't very, very tough, because they are - but baseball isn't all that likely to be the first target if anything else goes.

Title IX manifests in things like women's soccer being NCAA while men's soccer is a club sport.

Every couple of years some jockish student group or other starts agitating to bring back football: op-ed pieces in the student newspaper, maybe even petitions, that sort of thing. The powers that be smile indulgently, nod politely, and file any petitions in the deepest, dustiest stack of paper somewhere. It ain't gonna happen.