To discover one of the first institutions of higher learning to strike an entrepreneurial path in the burgeoning post-World War II business of college football, you must travel to an unlikely destination.

It is a place not to be found in the sleepy villages of the Deep South, or on the hearty land-grant behemoths of the Midwest, or amid the sun-splashed Italianate and Romanesque buildings of southern California campuses.

Your journey would take you instead to an Ivy League school immersed in the vibrancy of urban and highbrow intellectual life and that still boasts the Palestra, an iconic basketball cathedral, and the oldest active college football stadium in the nation.

For it was in 1950 that the University of Pennsylvania, located near the heart of Philadelphia, sold the rights to its home football games to the upstart American Broadcasting Company.

The Penn Quakers were among the best teams in the country at the time, ranked in the Top 20, routinely drawing 60,000 and more at Franklin Field, and enjoying the modest fruits of a local television arrangement.

For most of the leaders of organized sports — from college athletic directors to Major League Baseball owners — ticket sales were the lifeblood of their enterprises, and they were growing fiercely protective of their gates.

That’s because by 1950 more than 9 million televisions were owned by Americans, up sharply from the 7,000 sets sold in 1947, and the various networks were vying for sports programming to fill their airwaves.

As he became the Penn president, perpetual Republican presidential candidate Harold Stassen was eager for his football team to aspire to a larger public profile. He saw nationally televised games as means to this end.

The leaders of other schools and the National Collegiate Athletic Association did not, and in early 1951 NCAA members voted overwhelmingly to sharply curtail the television exposure of college football.

This ban also affected powerhouse teams at Georgia Tech and Notre Dame, which like Penn pioneered college football at the dawn of the television age.

But Stassen forged ahead, ordering his athletic director to work out terms of a $180,000 deal with ABC for the 1951 season. It took all of one day for the NCAA to declare Penn a member “not of good standing.”

Under NCAA pressure, Columbia, Cornell, Princeton and Dartmouth vowed to cancel games against Penn if its Ivy League rival insisted on its television course. Penn backed down, and the largely toothless NCAA gained some real power for the first time.

This story constitutes the opening pages of “The Fifty-Year Seduction,” Alabama sportswriter Keith Dunnavant’s 2004 history of televised college football and an authoritative account of the growth of big-time college athletics.

In the wake of Penn’s retreat, Notre Dame flirted with, but eventually abandoned, the idea of challenging the NCAA, which would soon add enforcement authority under the domineering leadership of executive director Walter Byers.

In a rare bit of sharp editorializing, Dunnavant strongly sympathized with those schools looking out for their own interests:

“By attempting to coerce Penn to surrender its television property, the NCAA and the four Ivy League schools crossed a line. It was a despicable, shameful act of thuggery, a strong-arm tactic worthy of back alley hoodlums and pulp fiction gangsters.

. . . . . .

“It was the sports equivalent of a third-world dictator nationalizing a foreign corporation’s assets, and such socialistic robbery violated the foundations of American justice and economic liberty.”

Such fierce rhetoric, usually coming from the solons of college football, is laced through Dunnavant’s book, peaking with the 1984 U.S. Supreme Court decision to strip the NCAA of its chokehold on college football television contracts and continuing through the start of the Bowl Championship Series era in the late 1990s.

These views reflect the perspective of the university presidents and athletic directors who morphed into businessmen as the TV deals fattened, and as the stadium crowds on Saturday afternoons surged.

Although the protectionists’ fears may have been reduced to rubble as the game became awash in more money than ever before, reformers, women’s sports activists and those alarmed by the commercialization of college athletics grew more concerned.

These are tensions that remain today, with conferences purloining individual schools amid a rollicking wave of realignment and a four-team college football playoff replacing the current BCS format in 2014.

While many bemoan the confounding geography of what’s transpiring today, Dunnavant writes of an “airplane conference” floated in the late 1950s that would have included the defiant trio of Notre Dame, Penn and Georgia Tech, along with Penn State, the military academies and USC, UCLA, Cal, Washington and Stanford of the temporarily-disbanded Pac 8.

It’s tempting to think that college football is in unprecedented times, and it is, in terms of the amount of money that’s being pursued. There are plenty of reasons to fret about what continued shuffling will mean not only for the sport, but other men’s and women’s offerings as well.

But while Penn may have been rebuffed in its attempt to go rogue, the most recent conference jumps by Maryland, Rutgers and Louisville illustrate that far from disrupting the order of things, those moves symbolize more than six decades of constant restlessness at the root of post-war college football.

Jeff MacGregor went to the Pinstripe Bowl at Yankee Stadium Saturday, but there was nothing evocative about the experience:

In life and in sports, these fictions of history are a more seductive reality. This is especially so at Yankee Stadium, itself a time machine and a tomb and a shrine to better days, a replica of something impossible and mythological: the house that The House That Ruth Built built. So it is possible on a black afternoon in a 21st century December to look up into the lights and the streaming snow and to mourn things you’ve never known, like bootleg whiskey and nickel cigars, fedoras and shined shoes, hand-painted neckties and wet woolens, Schrafft’s and the automat and Luchow’s, Stillman’s Gym and the Seven Blocks of Granite, Mel Allen and Toots Shor and Jack Dempsey, the Stork and El Morocco and the Copacabana, too. You say goodbye to places you’ve never been and to people you never met. Whole nations, generations gone, dead as real burlesque.

Maybe in the age of instantaneous disposability, the distance of history gives the illusion of meaning. By comparison, the new and the modern feel inauthentic. Artificial. Trumped up. Maybe in the 22nd century, people will look back on the third annual Pinstripe Bowl and know that this was the real thing. There are 39,098 paid seekers of the authentic shivering here.

And at halftime in the rain and the snow, the score is 12 to 7.

Andy Hutchins asks the essential question about the AP’s examination of PED use in college football:

“So the point of this ‘BOO THERE ARE STEROIDS IN SPORTS’ report is what?”

That is the point, and Tim Keown is happy to pile on:

“High school kids are getting and using steroids with the complicit approval of their parents and coaches. This isn’t news. Middle-aged rec-league cyclists are taking PEDs to improve their times and beat their buddies in weekend races. To think that a significant number of college athletes in a billion-dollar business with hopes of professional riches aren’t willing to get an illegal edge is ludicrous. Of course they are, especially when there’s little to no fear of getting caught.

“But college linemen don’t have hallowed records to break or a bizarrely sanctified hall of fame run by a chosen priesthood of voters. They’re just faceless guys wearing helmets and abusing their bodies for the entertainment of many and the profit of some.”

This is what the next phase of the post-Armstrong War on Steroids meme will sound like, and it will be repeated over and over and over.

In the name of the children.

Millard Baker raises even better points about cycling anti-doping crusader David Millar’s tut-tutting of the support for Armstrong from Alberto Contador and Miguel Indurain:

“There are likely cultural differences in the perception of doping. Perhaps steroids and PEDs are not stigmatized to the same degree in Spain. Perhaps doping does not have the same moral significance in Spain. But Millar’s arrogant defense of the superiority of the ‘Anglo-Saxon [puritanical] mentality’ certainly can’t be the best approach to doping in sports.”

Byliner reports that its most-read sports story of 2012 is Andrew Tilin’s “I couldn’t be more positive,” published in Outside magazine in May and recounting the year he spent taking T for a book project. Not surprisingly, Tilin felt the wrath of competitive cyclists whose existences are routinely scrutinized by the PED police:

“I’m not saying that what I did is smart or cool, or that my kids should someday be proud of me. But I discovered a few things, like how accessible performance-enhancing drugs really are. They’re so easy to acquire and safely use that I still wonder how many other graybeards dope.

“While I offer sincere apologies and would never again betray my fellow racers, cycling’s organizers, or its governing bodies, I’ll be honest: If you threw out the rules and put a doctor in front of me holding syringes? The temptation would be hard to resist.”

Johnny Manziel’s heartfelt speech upon winning the Heisman Trophy Saturday undoubtedly would have made the honor’s namesake proud.

For as fearlessly — and occasionally brashly — as the Texas A & M quarterback plays the game, earning him the nickname “Johnny Football,” his humility in the wake of being the first freshman to win the award was refreshing.

But the story of the man bearing the name is a rather interesting one too, going beyond his status as a coaching legend and including his role in the growth of the game off the field.

“Heisman: The Man Behind the Trophy,” written by John M. Heisman, the coach’s great-nephew, with Mark Schlabach, a former colleague of mine at The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, was published in October in anticipation of the award.

Heisman moved to New York in 1930 as the first director of the Downtown Athletic Club, but he was bearish on the idea of awarding a trophy to the top player in college football when the idea was pushed within his own organization.

In an excerpt published Friday on The Quad, the college football blog of The New York Times, the co-authors reveal the artistic roots of the actual object that’s been handed out every year since 1935:

“In searching for a unique design, the Downtown Athletic Club commissioned Frank Eliscu, a 23-year-old recent graduate of the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, to design the trophy. Eliscu had won a National Academy prize for his sculptures, and was looking for a job that paid.

“Eliscu decided to make the trophy by using a metal-casting method known as the lost-wax process. He asked his friend, Ed Smith, a running back at New York University, to pose for the design of the sculpture. Eliscu decided to go with a football player sidestepping and straight-arming a would-be tackler. The Downtown Athletic Club officers approved Eliscu’s initial design and he molded a clay sculpture. Eliscu took the model to Fordham University and Rams Coach Jim Crowley, one of Notre Dame’s famed Four Horsemen, had his players take various positions to illustrate the football sidestep.

“Over the next 76 years, it would become one of the most recognized trophies in American sports.”

The book is billed as the first “authorized and definitive biography” of Heisman, who died in 1936, and includes a forward from former Heisman winner Steve Spurrier, a noted coach in his own right.

While Manziel made a notable piece of Heisman history, the history of the man for whom that trophy is named has been been filled in admirably in this new account.

Here’s more on Heisman by Mike Jensen of The Philadelphia Inquirer from a couple of years ago.

“Those who think that sports are merely entertainment have been bemused by an entertainment culture.”

– Michael Novak, “The Joy of Sports”

For those who insist that the commercial colossus of major college football has no soul, that it is played out primarily for television audiences in the pursuit of maximum ratings by teams that use unscrupulous methods to procure unpaid teenage talent, I give you Saturday night’s Alabama-Georgia SEC Championship game.

Granted, I had emotional interests in this, so I was going to be hooked from the start. But as Georgia ran out of time on Alabama’s 4-yard-line, and as tens of thousands in the Georgia Dome and elsewhere were screaming about why Bulldogs quarterback Aaron Murray didn’t spike the ball to stop the clock, I had just one thought that I have kept to myself, until now:

This wasn’t just entertainment. This wasn’t just a good way for sports fans to kill a few hours on a Saturday afternoon, and into a Saturday evening. Calling it “A Game for the Ages” just doesn’t cut it, even if that description is completely accurate.

It is, like most of what has been written and said about this game, inadequate.

While there was plenty to play for — a trip to the national championship game for the winner — what the Bulldogs and Crimson Tide gave us has been absolutely missed by the sports media, churning away as it constantly does, tossing out conventional platitudes and throwaway references. There are deadlines to be met, more than ever.

This wasn’t spectacle. This wasn’t entertainment. This couldn’t, shouldn’t have been reduced to simplistic “instant analysis” that is rarely expanded upon, unless it’s to dub it an “Instant Classic.”

Why do we of the sports realm limit ourselves to what games like this truly represent? Why must the confines of the sport represent all that this game embodied?

This epic contest transcended football, and sports, although I doubt that many who don’t follow or care much for college football ever knew what had happened.

That’s fine. But even if you wanted Alabama to win, the gut-wrenching agony in the faces of Georgia players and coaches was hard to ignore. The hurt and the pain reflected a game that didn’t turn out in their favor, but it symbolizes so much more than who won and who lost.

I’ve spent most of this college football season fretting about conference realignment, NCAA “investigations” of minor misdeeds and the inherent violence of the game. But what’s been bothering me more than anything in our flood-the-zone, on-demand sports media world is how worthless so many games have been rendered.

The sheer volume of every game not only being televised, but overanalyzed to death, has been absolutely dispiriting. Instead of yapping on talk radio or a podcast or Tweeting or blogging on something to an incessant degree, to boost traffic and ratings and a “personal brand,” sports journalists should be helping us make sense of what’s important in all of this. Not just the game they covered, or the team or conference they’re assigned to.

Not this interminable “What We Learned” tripe (see “instant analysis,” above). Help me understand why I should care, beyond the fact that it’s just another game and in college football every game counts, yedy yedy. What’s the significance beyond the immediate moment?

Three days after Georgia-Alabama, I still feel short of breath when I think of the dramatic twists and the big plays. Alec Ogletree’s recovery of a blocked field goal for a touchdown. A.J. McCarron’s magnificent head-on-a-platter touchdown pass to Amari Cooper.

And Georgia’s ill-fated final pass play.

These will remain timeless, as does Novak’s assessment so many years ago of a new breed of sports journalist wizened to the world, but, as it turns out, tone deaf to the true meaning about which he writes:

“The motive for regarding sports as entertainment is to take the magic, mystification and falsehood out of sports. . .

“I don’t watch football to pass the time. The outcome of the game affects me. I care. Afterward, the emotion I have lived through continues to affect me. Football is not entertainment. It is far more important than that.”

]]> http://www.wendyparker.org/2012/12/much-more-than-sports-as-mere-entertainment/feed/ 0 http://www.wendyparker.org/2012/09/best-sports-reads-and-links-sept-15/ http://www.wendyparker.org/2012/09/best-sports-reads-and-links-sept-15/#comments Sat, 15 Sep 2012 10:00:13 +0000 Wendy Parker http://www.wendyparker.org/?p=4757 Tweet

Rounding up some of the most intriguing reads I’ve come across this week, posted on Sports Biblio, my experimental Tumblr companion to this site, or that I have Tweeted and collected elsewhere:

• Pigskin Progessivism — George Will’s war on football, American-style, now seems to blame the political movement popularized by (an unnamed) Teddy Roosevelt for the rise and dominance of college football. Just the way the union-loving, high-tax, government-giveaway liberal majority down South likes it.
• Death Spiral — Online journalism guru and New York Mets blogger Jason Fry thinks his team’s lack of money to improve might be the last straw for his fandom.
• Stage Struck — The art of the sports profile, with an emphasis on top tennis stars, gets the profile treatment in The Paris Review from Scott Korb, who leans John McPhee’s way in identifying the master of the form.
• The Death of the Anna Kournikova Era — Was there one? Jay Caspian Kang says so at Grantland, where he wonders whether we’ve finally overcome our objectification of female athletes this summer. This is such a facile hot mess I don’t know where to start, so I’ll stop.
• Writing the Olympics — Nicolas Lezard agreed to write a thousand or so words a day every day during the London Olympics, which he wasn’t interested in. His words have become a book, “Nolympics,” just published by Penguin.
• Ajax, the Dutch, the War — Simon Kuper explains the difficulties getting information about and talking to Holocaust survivors while reporting his book, just now published in the U.S.: “Since finishing the book, I have found myself almost unable to read or hear anything about the Holocaust.”

The Bowl Championship Series computer spit out an extremely tiny difference between second-place Alabama and third-place Oklahoma State in setting up the all-SEC rematch many are dreading. (Officially, the computer gap is .0086, but who’s counting? The math still edges out the Cowboys.)

Oklahoma State’s fatal flaw, Gregg Doyel asserts, is that it’s not in the SEC.

But even in SEC country, there is grousing about the system too. In Birmingham, Jon Solomon argues that if “every game counts” then LSU should already be a national champion.

In Atlanta, Mark Bradley is dismayed by Kirk Herbstreit’s admission that his measuring stick for picking the two BCS finalists is “the eyeball test:”

And that’s what big-time college football has become — a game of brands, not reality. Is it mere coincidence that ESPN has a 15-year contract to carry SEC games? (ESPN also has a contract with the Big 12, Oklahoma State’s diminishing league, but the bigger Big 12 package is with Fox Sports.)

Dennis Dodd said it’s not right to blame the SEC but the voters.

Ivan Maisel makes an analogy understandable to the huddled masses on the East Coast:

“Ladies and gentlemen, the modern American sports fan’s nightmare — a World Series featuring the Yankees.”

In full Death-to-the-BCS mode, Dan Wetzel points out it was SEC commissioner Mike Slive who first proposed the “plus-one” playoff that many are now clamoring for. So the predictable outrage is being predictably misplaced:

“The BCS built the SEC’s reputation. And now the SEC’s reputation has overwhelmed the BCS.

“When Slive drew up his ‘plus one’ plan, he was reacting to 2004, when a 13-0 Auburn team got snubbed from the title game. He wanted a more expansive postseason that would assure his teams a chance to settle things on the field.

“So in 2008, he unveiled his plan, which he thought would not only help the SEC but improve the sport overall. Before the BCS meeting, he said, ‘I think we will be able to discuss at a high level a tangible concept that has been [hashed] through.’

“Instead, there was no discussion. High level or low.

“The reason? That a ‘plus one’ would prove so popular and profitable that there would be pressure to expand it, something the powerful bowl lobby opposes.”

So will Mike Slive’s plus-one idea gain any traction? The Arizona Republic’s splendid seven-part BCS series from last month would indicate that action from the Solons, no matter how badly their ruse continues to be exposed, will take more than yet another unsatisfactory final poll.

This is the seventh in a series entitled “Women’s Sports Without Illusions” that critically examines the nearly four decades of the women’s sports movement, including Title IX, cultural and social developments, the growth of professional and international women’s sports and current challenges and issues.

All posts in this series can be found here.

Yesterday I mapped out a few ideas on how Title IX compliance might be changed to reflect the progress of women’s college athletics today, mindful that none of these will probably go anywhere. Instead of boosting participation numbers to match proportionality, I argue that issues over funding, facilities and related matters be made the focal point of new sports regulations.

Today I’ll explain why what we have now is what we’re stuck with, probably for at least another 30 years.

Has this all been a waste of time, then? I don’t think so. The public’s view of what Title IX is has been defined by just one narrow band of interest groups that nonetheless dominates, in large part because there’s not much in the way of any alternative being presented.

Why the 3-part test won’t go

It’s politics. The Women’s Sports Foundation and National Women’s Law Center have made Title IX their highest priority, and it shows. Ever since the mid-1990s, with the Cohen vs. Brown decision and a policy clarification that made proportionality the de facto standard for sports compliance, the Title IX establishment has scored victory after victory, in courts of law and public opinion.

Rather uncritical mainstream media coverage hasn’t hurt with the latter, even though some reporters do a good job explaining the concerns of those advocating on behalf of displaced male athletes. But critics like the College Sports Council have struggled to get any kind of sustained traction for their views, outside of “he said, she said” stories purporting to demonstrate “balance” on a hot topic. And they simply don’t have the law on their side, as it is being interpreted by the federal courts. At times, the CSC can sound as shrill as the women’s groups it opposes, and that’s saying something. We have two entrenched positions that are ironclad. This will not spur meaningful change.

There’s also no willpower in Washington to change any of this. Title IX has become something of a third-rail issue, and frankly, it wasn’t a terribly high priority in Congress even before the current economic crisis. Bush’s education secretary didn’t act on his own Title IX commission’s recommendations, some of which tried to stake out at least a few new ideas worth pondering. They’ve been shelved, probably permanently.

It’s legal. There’s quite a bit of case law and legal precedent for maintaining the status quo. A new set of regulations would take years to craft into a workable set of options for colleges to follow, as guided by the courts. The Supreme Court declined to take up Cohen v. Brown in 1997 because there had been no disagreement at two lower court levels. There has been little since about anything significant regarding the 3-part test.

Football and proportionality

Because the 3-part test is here to stay, here’s another vexing issue that has been around for years: Should football be counted in the proportionality equation?

I’ve long said no — and so have others — because football is a different animal, both in having no female equivalent and with the specialized nature of the sport prompting large rosters. I say this realizing that this suggestion now is basically a non-starter.

Here’s a little history lesson: Two years after Title IX was passed, there was an effort in Congress to exempt revenue-producing sports. However, the Tower Amendment failed, leading to legislation that created the sports regulations we have now, including the 3-part test. I don’t see how any renewed effort to take football out of Title IX compliance will fly.

And given the current problems in college football, it’s implausible that any position to keep that sport away from the gender equity fray can be taken seriously. Even if it makes sense. If you make it a men vs. women thing, which the women’s advocates will do, it will be very easy to pinpoint where the more troubling issues lie.

Currently the Football Bowl Subdivision (formerly I-A) scholarship limit is 85; it used to be 120 before Title IX compliance began in earnest. I’ve thought for a while about cutting the number, perhaps to 70, and then taking football out of the picture.

But I hate the idea of more men being turned away. Even if you agree that football is bloated, there are real human beings who did nothing to hold back women athletes but who are paying the price for what happened before they were born.

I also loathe roster management, although keeping down costs is a persistent issue in football. Here’s another doozy from Ball State, which spent $88,000 to lodge football players before home games. The NCAA could put some teeth in curtailing this, but it hasn’t for years. Serious college football reform efforts would need to include much more than any impact on women’s sports, but those are about as likely to take place as scotching the 3-part test.

Title IX advocates insist there’s still a lot of fat remaining that needs to be cut. Especially below the BCS level schools do lose money on football, sometimes a lot of money.

The political reality is the women’s advocates won’t budge in having football tied to proportionality, and they’d raise holy hell if anybody tried to cut it out. Without football in the mix, most schools would comply with Title IX, and men’s and women’s non-revenue teams might get more proper attention.

These changes alone still won’t yield the money that would conceivably be redistributed to the women’s side. And scaling back football, even to a modest degree, has never encouraged a young woman to try out for a team.

Some other suggestions for reform

Sportswriter Beau Dure doesn’t think that football “should be given a pass.” But he suggests adding a fourth prong of compliance for schools that already provide a healthy roster of sports for women:

“If you’ve got fully funded women’s basketball, field hockey, golf, lacrosse, soccer, softball, tennis and volleyball, do you really have to add women’s-only rowing and equestrian just for equity’s sake? Or cut a men’s program for fear of following Brown as a loser in court?

“If I have a bias in all this, it’s as a fan of soccer and Olympic sports. They’re threatened — across the board. Women’s basketball has grown by leaps and bounds — at Duke, I attended games that drew a couple hundred fans; today, they draw several thousand. Great. Let’s invest elsewhere.”

What an amazingly sane idea.

Little room for optimism

However, the last thing the powerful women’s interests groups want is for colleges to actually reach compliance; it would endanger their advocacy. Besides, there’s fertile new ground for litigation at the scholastic level, and the National Women’s Law Center’s most recent publicity stunt is a declaration of these intentions. Hundreds, and perhaps thousands, of high school districts across the country face lawsuits and some very painful prospects at a time when many of them are laying off teachers, gutting academic programs and closing schoools.

More disturbingly, so-called Title IX legal experts are getting all dreamy about the future of the law, interpreting the current status as only just the beginning of where they want to go next. Says former NWLC attorney Deborah Brake in her recent book on Title IX:

“Degendering sports is an important part of securing sex equality in sports.”

Protect your privates, fellas. Here we go again. More on that later in the week.

Coming Wednesday: Do girls and women really need sports? Yes, this is another heretical question I’m asking here. But you may not be aware of the soul-crushing reasons women’s advocates have cited to virtually beg females to get in the game.

—

Women’s Sports Without Illusions: The Series.

This is the sixth in a series entitled “Women’s Sports Without Illusions” that critically examines the nearly four decades of the women’s sports movement, including Title IX, cultural and social developments, the growth of professional and international women’s sports and current challenges and issues.

All posts in this series can be found here.

Since I’ve been saying for quite a while that the 3-part test for Title IX sports compliance is flawed, I thought I ought to propose how the law might be improved. I’m not alone in suggesting at least an evaluation of where we are after more than 30 years, but you probably won’t hear much about all that this week, with Thursday’s 39th anniversary of the passage of Title IX approaching. The Sisterhood chanting has already begun. It will be largely uncritical.

The College Sports Council, which has called for changes to Title IX for a number of years, wants to reinstate the interest survey (boosted by the Bush administration in 2005 but booted by the Obama administration in 2009). This is a non-starter for the Title IX diehards, who claim that women are as interested in sports as men. While I generally agree with the CSC on Title IX issues, it offers few other ideas on reforming the law.

I may under the biggest illusion of all in believing that the 3-part test can be replaced with new regulations to fit the times. But I’ll throw out a few ideas that are by no means anything more than that.

But first, here are the three options for Title IX sports compliance that were adopted in 1979:

– The percentage of female and male athletes is substantially proportionate to the percentage of female and male undergraduates, respectively.

– Demonstrate a history of continuing and expanding opportunities for the underrepresented sex (women in virtually every instance).

– “Fully and effectively” accommodate the interests and abilities of the underrepresented sex (again, this is almost always females).

Why the 3-part test must go

It’s antiquated. When the HEW policy interpretation cited above went into effect, women were in the distinct minority in college athletic programs, and far below parity in higher education overall. The latter is hardly the case today, with women comprising in many cases 55-60 percent of a college’s undergraduate enrollment.

With regards to the first test, while women are not at 50 percent in most cases in athletic departments, they are surpassing that in some instances, even at programs with large football programs. Example in my backyard: The University of Georgia, where 52 percent of the athletes are women. But because the female undergraduate enrollment is 58 percent, a school with one of the most successful women’s athletics programs in the nation is vulnerable to Title IX litigation.

That’s why UGA likely will add another women’s sport in the near future. Like many schools, it is open to a lawsuit for reasons having nothing to do with sports, but rather how many females, most of whom will never suit up, gain admission through a non-athletic component of the university administration.

It punishes male athletes. Title IX absolutists expect athletic departments to keep up with enrollment patterns, but to reasonable people this truly is the warped logic of proportionality. Georgia hasn’t cut men’s teams to move closer toward complying with the first test, thanks to bulging athletic coffers. But it’s the exception and not the rule.

As for the second test, there’s no seeming end to how long women’s teams may be added. There’s one big problem: There aren’t that many more sports to add. The NCAA’s list of Emerging Sports for Women, which is compiled to assist athletic programs with Title IX compliance, currently has only four sports, and one of them, squash, will be dropped in August.

The other three sports don’t figure to attract a groundswell of support; indeed, both equestrian and sand volleyball were issued reprieves by the NCAA last year after failing to add enough varsity programs to “show promise” of being NCAA-sponsored sports. The other is rugby, which currently has only two varsity women’s teams in the entire nation. If the NCAA can’t find any viable new sports to add then perhaps “emerging” is the wrong choice of words.

Lacrosse, now reaching into the Deep South, may be the only women’s sport left with major growth potential. There’s also the controversial subject of competitive cheerleading, which I’ll discuss in a later post this week.

As for the third test, it’s hard to “accommodate the interests and abilities” of the underrepresented sex if you can’t adequately survey what those interests may be. The Title IX establishment doesn’t trust interest surveys, claiming they could get caught in an e-mail spam filter. It’s more likely they fear the answers that women students may provide won’t jibe with their proportionality ideal. A political favor by the Obama White House has made the activists happy (as conservative interests were pleased with the 2005 Bush policy clarification), and that’s all that matters. This prong has been effectively neutered.

What I’d like to see

The battle to get girls and women in the game has been a resounding success. Shifting the Title IX compliance framework away from participation and toward taking care of what’s been built is a possibility worth pondering.

Another example in my backyard: Two years ago, Georgia Tech — which because of its low female enrollment achieved proportionality years ago — opened a beautiful new on-campus softball stadium for its nationally ranked program. Tech has just seven teams for women, and is the only school in the ACC without a women’s soccer program. Without the pressure of having to add teams, Tech is better resourcing what teams it has, which helps with recruiting and enhances the student-athlete experience.

Throughout the country, there are still are plenty of disparities in facilities, funding, equipment, travel and recruiting budgets and related components of operating a college sports team. This is part of Title IX compliance, too, but it’s overshadowed by the furor over the 3-part test. A recent series of stories in the Ball State student newspaper illustrated what work remains to be done, and it is considerable at that school and many others.

Imagine this: Instead of wasting time and money adding teams in obscure sports that struggle to attract participants, schools could use those dollars on better venues, improve coaching salary scales and create an environment for women athletes that’s truly special. New regulations based around these deficiencies would fulfill the spirit of Title IX better than the current numbers game athletics departments have to play to get right with proportionality.

So much of the money that is spent on women’s sports has often come with little of what I call emotional support, and this might be the biggest shortcoming of all. Too many athletics directors simply throw money at women’s teams because they have to under Title IX, and then go off and deal with football boosters or new arena architects. They don’t want to be bothered.

Far too many women’s teams, especially in basketball, could stand to be better marketed and promoted. There’s plenty of TV exposure in hoops thanks to rich conference multi-sport deals, but a more ground-level marketing wouldn’t hurt. If they’re not going to make money, at least they could draw more of a crowd. Too many schools do too little in this regard, and this change has to start at the top.

On the other hand, women’s sports activists who have won resoundingly in the courts for their cause also have won over few people with their us vs. them, to-the-death tactics. It’s hard to give something emotional support when you might be sued by people who have no interest in persuading you to care.

Coming Tuesday: Why all these ideas — or anyone else’s — are likely to go splat. And why unwedding football from proportionality is a longshot.

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Women’s Sports Without Illusions: The Series.

Quite a bit has transpired since I wrote here last week about the growing clamor over Title IX and the proportionality debate that isn’t new, but has taken on a fresh dimension:

• First of all, in a column that slams the graft and corruption of college football, George Vecsey of The New York Times on Saturday piled on the “football is the enemy of Title IX” meme, and this was rather unfortunate:

“Let’s ask the question: What causes this insatiable need for female (or ersatz female) names and numbers? It stems from the gigantic elephant leaving proof of its presence smack in the middle of most college campuses: King Football.”

• Missing from Vecsey’s analysis — and he’s a columnist I’ve long admired — is any mention of the fact that “King Football,” men’s basketball and their ultra-rich television contracts pay the freight for the most successful women’s athletics programs. For those who doubt this, check out the nifty little deal revealed Tuesday between the soon-to-be Pac 12 Conference, ESPN and Fox.

It’s for 12 years and is worth an estimated $3 billion, the richest ever for a college sports conference. Like previous media packages involving the ACC, SEC and Big 12, women’s and men’s non-revenue sports will benefit from the increased exposure. As I wrote recently, the wildly successful Big Ten Network is combining handsome profits with a commitment to devote half its programming to women’s sports. Football is the benefactor, not the enemy.

SEC football behemoth LSU recently hired away Nikki Caldwell from UCLA to coach its women’s basketball team, and will be paying her a minimum of $700,000 a year. Not bad for someone with only three years of head coaching experience in a sport that loses millions. But unlike activists and journalists, Caldwell lives in the real (perhaps surreal) world of college athletics and like many in her position understands the need to make the alumni and booster club rounds with her football and men’s basketball counterparts.

• Former Women’s Sports Foundation CEO Donna Lopiano continues her decades-long lament to stop “this damn arms race in football and men’s basketball.” It is true that the money some coaches make and the expenses these sports roll up are increasingly breathtaking. But so are the sums being spent on women’s basketball, and coaching salaries in particular, although she does not acknowledge this, nor how they are being financed.

What’s driving this argument is the activists’ longstanding animus for football, which might be as insatiable as the appetite of fans for more televised college football. It is the arms race in non-revenue sports — for both men and women — that ought to be a greater concern.

• The Times on Monday detailed the University of Delaware’s recent decision to cut its men’s track and cross-country team as a pre-emptive measure against any possible Title IX violations in the future. Now that’s a relatively new twist to an old, sad story. But with women the majority of the undergraduate students at Delaware and many other schools, the male athletes’ claims of discrimination as the “underrepresented” gender bear watching.

• However, the real pain that too many young men have been feeling in the name of “leveling the playing field” falls on deaf ears within the Title IX establishment. Judging from an account inside the echo chamber of this week’s NCAA gender equity confab, the status quo was firmly upheld. Furthermore, invitees were treated to “a brilliant keynote address” on policies dealing with sexual abuse by coaches and calls to eliminate sexist and homophobic language in sports.

Good luck with that last one.

• Welch Suggs, a former reporter for The Chronicle of Higher Education whom I met on the Title IX “beat” and who has written a very good book on this subject, is challenging me to come up with a “serious, dispassionate review of Title IX regulations.” Well, although I do have certain point of view I think I’ve done some of that here, and I will expand on this soon.

As Suggs notes, I’m not the only woman who feels the way I do, as noted journalist Hanna Rosin commented on this topic last week at Slate. Her perspective comes from delving into gender-related issues that are far larger than sports: How women, with their superior numbers in higher education, could dominate the post-industrial economy, and what that might mean for American society. She also wrote a compelling piece last year about Baylor All-American Brittney Griner and “the feminine dilemma of women’s basketball.”

• I appreciate the kind words from a number of people who read last week’s post, including sports business analyst Kristi Dosh, who’s begun a new blog, the Business of College Sports that I highly recommend. She’s been laying out a very methodical — dispassionate? — examination of how revenue sports are becoming increasingly necessary. I look forward to following what she uncovers. Fascinating stuff.

• A few other recent suggestions — none of them new — have sprung forth from various media quarters on solving the riddle of proportionality: Remove football from the head count. Add cheerleading to the head count.

I used to think these were good ideas, too, but what they don’t do is take proportionality out of the equation altogether. They merely perpetuate the numbers game — the head count — and that’s the main problem.

• The other two tests for Title IX sports compliance are just as unworkable. Some college athletic administrators are saying the same thing to the Title IX establishment, which, not surprisingly, seems surprised to hear this.