When Paul Wellstone died, one of his causes has been put by the wayside. This cause wasn’t one of his greatest causes by any means, but it was a very practical issue for college athletics.
As Title IX has been enforced, many schools have dropped sports to keep the opportunities for men and women roughly equal. In theory, keeping equal numbers shouldn’t be hard, except if one sport is only played by one gender and utilizes a large number of athletes compared to others. Of course, football fits both of those categories. Quite often, the less well informed whiners complain that men are losing out because of women’s more equal participation in sports. This is not really true though, since football is the primary problem. Football eats up scholarships and resources at amazing rates and except with a few exceptions from the very best programs, doesn’t make money.
It creates problems under Title IX because it is overwhelmingly male and thus with it in the mix, to make women’s opportunities equal, one must cut a bunch of ‘secondary’ sports. Most often hit are sports like wrestling that have few fans (at least outside of Oklahoma and Iowa) and are male only. Sometimes women sports are hit as well, but I assume this is a budgetary issue.
Wellstone was a college wrestler as was Jim Leach. As a piss poor high school wrestler I found this issue fascinating. Leach and Wellstone put a package together to help support specific sports that were facing the most pressure including wrestling and gymnastics. Here is a press realease about the initiatives.
Why now? Today the P-D reports on some of the movement to weaken Title IX. The strange thing is that none of the reforms work to provide more athletic opportunities for college students as any reform should. Wellstone-Leach would.
College athletics should be about providing for athletic opportunities for the most students, not for the most fans.