It’s mid-to-late February. The Super Bowl is over, conference play in college basketball is heating up, and pitchers and catchers have reported.

Which means it’s time for the annual flogging of Sports Illustrated for its popular and highly lucrative swimsuit issue, now hitting the stands with Kate Upton leaving little to the imagination.

But instead of the usual sports feminist scolds doing the complaining, we have two middle-aged male sportswriters echoing similar concerns, and in some cases employing buzzwords found in a NOW press release.

I like both of these writers — Ed Sherman, formerly of The Chicago Tribune and now running an eponymous sports media site, and Michael Bradley, who’s written for ESPN The Magazine, among many outlets.

In the span of a week, they have both written that they think it’s hypocritical for SI to roll out this annual paean to red-blooded male leering not long after the magazine dedicated a special issue to the 40th anniversary of Title IX.

Sherman also was concerned that too many of the models were wearing only half of their bikinis, and conducted empirical research — by counting, apparently — to reach this conclusion:

And Vegas, here’s your winning total: 39. And that’s give or take a few I might have missed. Either way, the number seems rather excessive, or as my wife would say, “outrageous.”

Again, what’s the point other than to titillate and sell a bunch of ads? And one more question: How long before SI goes full frontal topless? No arms strategically placed, etc…

But titillating and selling a bunch of ads has always been the point, as much as I wish it weren’t so.

At least Sherman ran his thoughts by an actual woman — his wife — before writing his post. Bradley, writing on the Indiana University National Sports Journalism Center website this morning, just ripped off standard feminist boilerplate in adding to Sherman’s point about the SI Title IX issue:

You can’t be an advocate for women’s rights and contribute to their objectification.

As I wrote in response to Bradley’s post, we live in a society in which women’s athletic developments are celebrated and embraced, unlike my pre-Title IX youth sports days.

Bully for that.

We saw this on display last night in a stirring women’s college basketball game between No. 1 Baylor, the defending national champion, and No. 3 UConn, which has seven NCAA titles to its name.

But we also live in a society in which drop-dead gorgeous women are still regarded as something to behold.

And bully for that too.

These are contradictory and “incongruent” things only to those who fall for simplistic, antiquated feminist rhetoric that’s still stuck in the 1970s. There’s really nothing to reconcile.

To suggest that women’s continued progress in sports must necessitate the eradication of supposedly sexist portrayals of women in general is as unlikely as it is absurd.

SI makes a lot of money with the swimsuit issue. A lot of money. It also is one of the Time Inc. titles up for sale in a panicked decision that media guru Michael Wolff has savaged.

Even if the magazine were in better commercial shape to ditch the swimsuit issue, why should it? Bradley provocatively asks, “At some point, Sports Illustrated’s publishers have to decide that they stand for something beyond profit.”

What troubles me is something else being implied here: That because SI has done good some journalism about women’s sports — this 1973 piece still rates highly in my book — then it somehow should be about advancing the cause of women’s sports.

Bradley’s is a valid question, one that many of us who have been in print media have muttered as we took newspaper and magazine buyouts or dealt with layoffs and early retirements.

During its early years, as it strived to fill a niche and develop an identity, SI lost money, a lot of money, according to “The Franchise,” Michael MacCambridge’s 1997 history of the magazine. It eventually became a gold mine before the advent of the swimsuit issue, on the strength of stylish writing, hard-nosed investigations and spectacular photography. Those have been its causes.

There’s a troubling notion at work here that women’s political, educational and legal gains, including Title IX and sports, are being undermined by photos of supermodels in fishnet bikini tops.

Those who follow this line of thought are serving up a set of false choices.

The American feminist establishment relentlessly projects the ideal woman as well-educated, in a successful, high-achieving, white-collar career in which she fights for, and ultimately gains, power and social status that men have long enjoyed. Sports feminists have crafted a similar variation of an “empowered” female athlete, with a healthy body image unrelated to how she looks.

These are all noble things, and I support removing barriers for women who want to pursue those avenues.

But there’s little room in this narrative for the expression of sex, or traditional feminine sexuality, since that plays to male erotic desires which cannot be tolerated in this egalitarian vision.

Even women who choose to pose — and Lindsey Vonn donned a swimsuit for SI right before winning Olympic gold in Vancouver — are regarded as complicit in their own objectification.

While SI’s Title IX issue had some terrific components — including its Top 40 female athletes list — it largely ignored the concerns of those like me, who are critics of how the law is being enforced.

Still, SI displayed a lot more journalistic rigor than espnW, which truly went over the top in uncritical Title IX adulation to mark the 40th anniversary. That espnW has designated the activist Women’s Sports Foundation as its official charity has not generated one paragraph of scrutiny from any sports media party that I know of, nor from ESPN’s ombudsman.

There aren’t swimsuit babes on espnW, which ought to please Sherman and Bradley. I do get their weariness at seeing these displays in a supposedly more enlightened time. Indeed, among the upcoming ESPN/espnW “30 for 30″ documentaries includes “Branded,” which focuses on Anna Kournikova. From the promo:

This film explores the double standard placed on women athletes to be the best players on the field and the sexiest off them. Branded explores the question: can women’s sports ever gain an equal footing with their male counterparts or will sex always override achievement?

Because a “double standard” is presumed, I already know what the filmmakers’ answer is going to be.

If anyone wants to see a powerful media outlet taking on the cause of women and sports, and doing it badly, I give them the latest from featured espnW columnist Kate Fagan, who trafficks in women-as-perpetual-victims-of-a-sexist-sports-culture on a regular basis.

She takes a stupid, infantile comment from one NBA player known for saying and doing many stupid things, and spins it into a broad indictment of American culture:

Some people might shrug and say this type of gender-bashing is bound to happen in a male-dominated environment. But, of course, we know there’s more to it than that: It’s a microcosm of how women are too often disregarded across society.

This is truly lamentable stuff, and it does the cause of female sports advancement no more favors than a topless Kate Upton or a winless Anna Kournikova ever could.

At Deadspin, John Koblin points out Michael Wilbon’s laments about what the latter thinks is a lack of stellar sportswriting from the past year, then sets up the ex-Washington Postie perfectly as a segue for rolling out the best sports shouters of 2012:

What better example than Wilbon himself, co-host of ESPN’s Pardon the Interruption—a man who abandoned prose so he could be adamant about things on television?

On Sunday NBC Sports and Yahoo! Sports announced that they have entered into a content-sharing arrangement, the latest example of old/new media collaboration in the hotly contested sports domain.

Unlike Turner Sports‘ recent acquisition of Bleacher Report, this isn’t a consolidation. Nor is it a vast reorganization, as has happened at USA Today, which also acquired The Big Lead.. Both NBC Sports and Yahoo! Sports will team up on a cross-platform basis primarily for major stories and events, save the Olympics (which remains NBC’s exclusive baby).

Yahoo! Sports has been jockeying with ESPN.com for top spot in ComScore’s sports web traffic rankings for some time, and this new deal is expected to yield 50 million monthly unique visitors for the new partners, the best sports numbers on the web.

The best quick analysis comes from Eric Fisher of the Sports Business Journal, who Tweeted Sunday night that “Point being, big scale, tons of content, lots of cross-platform integration all now pre-reqs to really play in this space.”

“This space” is now almost entirely dominated by corporate media entities or league-run sites such as NFL.com. Of the Top 10 sites on the ComScore sports list, the newly expanded and revamped SB Nation remains as a rare independent. The addition of excellent new content, such as the daily Longform feature I wrote about recently, was done to make SB Nation more valuable to advertisers.

But what about potential suitors for a merger, or a content-sharing agreement? Last week, Brian Solomon of Forbes dug into SB Nation’s prospects, speculating that it’s only now breaking even after spinning off from the liberal Daily Kos political blog network. It could be ripe for some kind of association, at the very least.

In just a very short order, the top corporate sports media players have strengthened their grip on the numbers and metrics that advertisers value most. Others are struggling to keep up, namely Sports Illustrated and The Sporting News, which announced today it is ending its 126-year print run and will become digital only.

As a veteran of corporate media who’s spent the last eight years on the digital side, I appreciate the power of the full-service sports sites. They reel in enough revenues to subsidize the longform experiments going on at places such as ESPN.com’s Grantland and USA Today’s Sports on Earth.

But the obsession over reaching numbers also figures, at some point, to crowd out anything but the top traffic-driving content. With the exception of ESPN.com’s espnW, most of these sites do little with women’s sports. While soccer has grown in popularity that’s reflected on many of these sites, some of the best material produced about the sport continues to be on independent sites, including the new XI Quarterly and American Soccer Now.

This is encouraging, but I wonder about the ability of other, and still-to-come independent sites on niche sports topics to enter the fray — on their own level, of course — and sustain themselves. If they’re successful enough on the right subjects, they might easily be swallowed up.

The competition to cover the NFL, college football, Major League Baseball and other dominant sports undoubtedly will be ramping up, even more fiercely than what we’re seeing now. But there is so much else about the sports world that doesn’t fit this bill, and the young male demographic desired by advertisers, that could be neglected entirely in the battle for more page views and unique visitors.

I don’t know what the numbers are for The Classical, which just celebrated its first year and was launched via Kickstarter with some impressive editorial ambitions. As editor David Roth writes, it’s “less business-neutered, less gymnastic in its starchy and secretly dumb avoidance of the colloquial; it has some intimation of humanity to it.” We need more of this quirkiness, however uneven The Classical has been at times, and even though it’s not a full-time job for the contributors.

The opportunities are there to deliver news, information and community on sports topics that are starving for attention, and have a respectable audience to reach. Like the best hyperlocal news sites, it will take some very dedicated, patient individuals to “cultivate a small field,” shunning volume for topical distinction and quality.

But it’s becoming a greater challenge to make this work, since “scale” seems to be all the rage.

The glee that comes with knowing that the 2012 edition of The Best American Sports Writing is now available didn’t last long.

I downloaded it onto my iPad (this is 2012), eager to dig into Wright Thompson on cricket, Thomas Lake on Darrent Williams, S.L. Price on Aliquippa football, Jeré Longman on Leo Messi, Alex Belth on George Kimball, Taylor Branch on the NCAA and Ben McGrath on Nancy Lieberman, among others.

The general editor, as usual, is Glenn Stout, who’s fighting the good fight bringing high-quality reads to the SB Nation blog network, as I wrote about last week.

(And today’s longform feature there comes from the wonderful Pat Jordan, an author and frequent contributor to Stout’s anthology, about the end of his brief minor league baseball career.)

Surely the remaining pleasant evenings of back porch reading this fall will be filled with such bliss as all this.

But so will the nagging thought that the books and contents of the devices that I hold in my hands are feeling like luxury items. That these, and not the race-to-the-bottom gruel that drives some of the most lucrative precincts of the sports Web, are the guilty pleasures.

Especially after I absorbed all of what SF Weekly writer Joe Eskenazi has to say in his damning report on Bleacher Report, another very popular site with most content written by unpaid fan contributors.

That’s because Bleacher Report is not only ridiculously profitable, Eskenazi reports it was designed precisely to be what it is. Paid writers with reputations for providing quality material have come later, not long before the site was purchased by Turner Sports.

Tom Ley at Deadspin took a few shots of his own: “What’s depressing about Bleacher Report is that it’s handed its editorial brain wholesale over to the marketplace and reduced the business to its most lamentable impulses.”

Oh really, this from Deadspin, which gave the world flood-the-zone coverage of Brett Favre’s schwanz? (I’m sorry, there’s no delicate way to put this, and my Teutonic blood nearly came to a boil over the laughable irony of Ley’s lament. Is he aware of how Nick Denton built his media empire?)

What is sobering is this paragraph from Eskenazi about Bleacher Report’s commercial success, as it sits at No. 3 on the growing heap of sports sites, far ahead of those run by newspapers and other venerable media organizations:

“After denigrating and downplaying the influence of the Internet for decades, many legacy media outlets now find themselves outmaneuvered by defter and web-savvier entities like Bleacher Report, a young company engineered to conquer the Internet. In the days of yore, professional media outlets enjoyed a monopoly on information. Trained editors and writers served as gatekeepers deciding what stories people would read, and the system thrived on massive influxes of advertising dollars. That era has gone, and the Internet has flipped the script. In one sense, readers have never had it so good — the glut of material on the web translates into more access to great writing than any prior era. The trick is sifting through the crap to find it. Most mainstream media outlets are unable or unwilling to compete with a site like Bleacher Report, which floods the web with inexpensive user-generated content. They continue to wither while Bleacher Report amasses readers and advertisers alike.”

I probably should be more bothered by this than I am, especially when I think about how those making The Best American Sports Writing of 2032 — if it’s still around by then — will earn their chops. Will they be living at home until they’re 35, blogging for free until they get a paying gig somewhere, anywhere?

But this doesn’t have to be a zero-sum game — some can have their crap “boobtastic” slideshows while others can be moved by the tragic story of Derek Boogaard. And all that’s in between.

I wrote hopefully last week that the longform evolution of sportswriting on the Web can be a very bright one. Dan Levy, a featured writer at Bleacher Report (and formerly with The Sporting News), has taken serious issue with Deadspin’s assertions, and, by extension, Eskenazi’s.

I do retain the cautious optimism “that chasing page views and appealing to the lowest common denominator just aren’t enough.”

Yet I also want to clutch my new book — or rather the tablet containing it — ever harder as a brace against the continuing onslaught of what prevails.

Just as Sports Illustrated’s latest Twitter 100 list was released at the end of last week, semi-retired Boston Globe columnist Bob Ryan tells Sports Business Daily in an exit interview of sorts that:

“The Twitter world has perverted any concept of perspective.”

While it may be easy to accuse Ryan of having a “Get Off My Lawn” attitude, read the rest of his response to a question by Joe Perez about his concerns for his industry:

“When everything is judged on pitch-by-pitch, play-by-play, moment-by-moment, that eliminates the sense of perspective and it’s extremely dangerous. It’s wrong. That’s where we are and who’s going to stop it? The idea of people who are allowed to let things simmer and play out, you can’t let things play out, you have to have an instant play-by-play of everything. That’s not the way sports should be. And certain sports are hurt more than others. When they start looking at baseball games the way they do football games, that’s a problem. Baseball needs time to play out. When that’s not allowed, it’s bad. The nature of the dialogue, the whole talk-show thing, instant analysis and the fact that in the talk-show sense, it is better to be negative then to be positive, is a problem. I don’t see it getting any better.”

Now Ryan’s been on a lot of sports talk programs over the years — ESPN’s “Around the Horn” and “Sports Reporters,” most notably — and he’s never been shy about offering instant analysis and off-the-cuff thoughts about a fresh sports controversy.

Television and radio mediums have long been repositories for this kind of fleeting, throwaway “discourse,” if that’s the proper word, that have made so much sports talk unwatchable and unlistenable (with a few exceptions).

(Disclaimer: Ryan is a long-time columnist at Basketball Times, where I also have written for the past 20 years. I’ve met him and spoke with him only once, during the 2000 Sydney Olympics, and have long admired his work.)

But for as much as I love the immediacy of Twitter (and I was thrilled to make SI’s Top 100 list a year ago), I have some of the same worries about the cumulative effects of the 24-7 impulse to say something authoritative, profound, clever and entertaining all at once.

And not just to get or stay on a list.

When I watch a game, almost any game, I scroll through my Twitter timeline and it overflows with snark and negativity more than anything else. That’s just human nature, and Lord knows I’m guilty of contributing to the river of schlock.

(When I do this, I truly hang my head in shame, mindful of what the magnificent Dorothy Parker — no relation, alas — had to say about the art of being funny:

“There’s a hell of a distance between wise-cracking and wit. Wit has truth in it; wise-cracking is simply calisthenics with words.”)

But Ryan says we’ve also gone from looking at sports in terms of who wins and loses, and how teams move on to the next game, to routinely assigning blame. This is a considerable distinction.

He understands that this instinct also is “natural,” and now it’s so much easier for everyone to chime in via social media. Maybe it’s been this way all along and I’m just noticing it, or trying to atone for my digital sins.

I’m not trying to blame the messenger, because Twitter has been beneficial for me in so many ways. It’s become a personal wire service and a way to stay immediately connected to news and issues that mean the most to me.

It’s not sufficient to just turn it off entirely in this business. But after five years on Twitter — and more than 10,000 Tweets! — regulating the fire hose has become a constant challenge.

New media types might rush to label Ryan a “curmudgeon,” but as soon as I sent out the SBD link yesterday it got some “old school” praise — on Twitter — from ESPN columnist J.A. Adande, who’s on the new SI Twitter list and someone I recommend following. A few sports columnists also worthy of the Ryan tradition on that list include Bruce Arthur of the National Post in Canada and Pat Forde and Dan Wetzel of Yahoo! Sports.

There are others, especially Bill Simmons, who doesn’t suit my taste. But that’s the beauty of a list like this, as subjective as it is. Mix in athletes and other sports personalities with the media types and there’s something there for everyone to sample.

If you want to stick with the old school, Ryan’s serving up a collection of his best columns in a new-fangled way, via Amazon Kindle.

How’d I find that out? On Twitter, of course.

The reaction to Jeré Longman’s story on American Olympic hurdler Lolo Jones in The New York Times Sunday was as swift and harsh as his piece that slammed her for waging “a sad and cynical marketing campaign” around her sex appeal, in lieu of what he claims are any significant athletic accomplishments:

“Women have struggled for decades to be appreciated as athletes. For the first time at these Games, every competing nation has sent a female participant. But Jones is not assured enough with her hurdling or her compelling story of perseverance. So she has played into the persistent, demeaning notion that women are worthy as athletes only if they have sex appeal. And, too often, the news media have played right along with her.”

This is one of the most sexist things I’ve seen written about a female athlete in quite a while, and it comes from a journalist who professes to care deeply about women’s sports. Unfortunately, Longman doesn’t seem to respect the individual choices of female athletes to do, and be, as they damn well please.

Deadspin’s Isaac Rauch jumped all over Longman in a flash, pointing out that he “pretty explicitly calls her a traitor to her gender” for risqué magazine poses, including ESPN The Magazine. More than that, however, the Times writer — whom I first met covering the Women’s World Cup in 1999 — is guilty of missing what has made Jones a hot media commodity. It’s not necessarily her body, or her looks. Writes Rauch:

“As it has with many other athletes, the media has allocated attention to her because she’s more interesting than most of her peers. She’s comfortable talking about a troubled childhood in public; other athletes aren’t.”

This is the most surprising thing to me about the diatribe by Longman, a talented reporter and storyteller who specializes in the kind of human interest profile that’s tailor-made for the Olympics.

However, his complaints about the alleged “sexualization” of female athletes are nothing new.

As one of the few mainstream journalists in the country exploring the cultural parameters of women in sports, Longman has fallen under the spell of a small handful of women’s sports “experts.” They are mostly academic feminists, lawyers and activists he approvingly cites in stories that rail against the “stereotyping” of female athletes. Some of them he quotes repeatedly, without any critical eye at all.

(I examine them, and his stenography of their arguments, in my recent e-book, “Beyond Title IX,” specifically chapters 11, 13, 15 and 19.)

Longman has parroted their singular critique often, on topics ranging from college basketball star Brittney Griner punching an opponent in a game; a female college soccer player, Elizabeth Lambert, getting in a fight with a foe; and Alex Morgan, a rising star of the U.S. women’s soccer team, who has no qualms about displaying her attractiveness for cameras.

In that last piece, published in April, he takes Morgan to task for posing, like Jones, in Sports Illustrated’s swimsuit issue:

“Presumably, Morgan wanted to show that she was strong and feminine. Instead, she reinforced the unfortunate notion that to be successful, female athletes must position themselves as sex objects. And endure more undercoating than a Toyota Corolla.”

Yet that all seems tame compared to his hatchet job on Lolo Jones, who, by the way, won her first heat in the 100 meter hurdles Monday morning.

Who made Jeré Longman the arbiter of what’s a sex object, and what’s a “persistent, demeaning notion” about how female athletes make themselves worthy?

Why is a middle-aged male sportswriter taking it upon himself to instruct a younger generation of female athletes how they should portray themselves?

He’s succumbed to the same impulse that has driven his “experts” to assume they know what’s right for female athletes. When they reject that patronizing, as Brandi Chastain, Lindsey Vonn and Amy Acuff have done, among others, these young women are then declared either to be brainwashed by the spotlight or powerless victims of a sexist media culture. But Longman’s breaking new ground here with his heavy-handed allegations against Jones.

I don’t like writing this. Longman’s a nice guy, has always been kind to me, is mild-mannered and funny. But he’s really gone off the rails here, following the tiresome sports feminist line that female athletes should not be about themselves, but the greater cause of women’s sports.

And the cause cannot be advanced if they take their clothes off, play to the desires of heterosexual males, or present themselves to the public as they choose.

For women athletes to be scolded this way is to defy everything that the women’s movement was supposed to be about: Allowing them the legal and cultural freedom to be themselves, and to direct the courses of their own lives. Nothing more, certainly not a brain-dead devotion to a cause.

What Longman and his “experts” represent is a new kind of sexism, feminist style, that dismisses women as individuals, and the choices they make.

This week I’m reposting some of my favorite posts from this year, and one of the subjects I’ve been focusing on is the dizzying, ever-changing world of sports media. The trick is not to do too much navel-gazing, one of the hazards of the profession.

Sports media is the subject of amazingly constant attention, and there are so many others who are truly on top of this. When I try to chime in, it usually brings out the worst in me.

For insightful, mature criticism of a field where juvenilia reigns far too often, Richard Deitsch of SI.com is the king. For great links and his fabulously-worded “quotage,” there’s Ken Fang. Jason Fry is all over digital media trends as it pertains to sports journalism.

There are others I am forgetting, so I apologize.

My focus on this blog has largely been about media coverage of women’s sports, and how the usual bromides and complaints get my blood boiling. I don’t always feel proud about this either even though I think I had some valuable points to make.

When I’m done venting, I just feel skunky and dissatisfied. It’s so easy to sound off, but more difficult to offer a better way of looking at something.

Most recently, I’ve been delving into the careers of legendary writers who’ve recently passed, such as George Kimball, and those who continue to remind us that this domain at times has been unfairly labeled the Toy Department.

In that same link, I wrote about John Schulian, now a Hollywood screenwriter, who collaborated with Kimball on a boxing collection and has recently published a new collection of his own writings.

When I came across this interview with New York writer Alex Belth, I mentioned that I was nearly in tears — tears of joy. And this isn’t about nostalgia for some time that never was. This is a treasure trove of what has drawn so many journalists to sports, and what keeps us there.

That book, “Sometimes They Even Shook Your Hand,” is on my list to read early in 2012, as I blogged about a couple weeks back. Not long after that, I received an e-mail from Schulian, which truly blew me away:

“What a wonderful surprise to come across your kind words about SOMETIMES THEY EVEN SHOOK YOUR HAND. I was trolling the Internet, just hoping no one was teeing off on my book, when I found it on your list of holiday recommendations. A million thanks for your praise, and a million more for putting SOMETIMES in such splendid company.

“I wish I could take you back in time to the era I talked about in my interview with Alex Belth. Life really was that good for sports writers — stylistic freedom, budgets that allowed for lots of travel, athletes who spoke in more than cliches. I’m not sure I realized how lucky I was then, but I do now.”

How kind, and how flattering this was. This is of the biggest rewards of blogging — to be discovered by someone totally unexpected.

Now he’s really going to make me cry. Tears of joy, for other reasons.

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.

As soon as I saw this Tweet from USA Today’s Christine Brennan this morning . . . .

@cbrennansports For those unhappy (disgusted?) with how #womensfinal4 is covered by most newspapers, check out#USAToday sports: http://usat.ly/2QcFT

. . . I realized it deserved the following response. I posted this first on Twitlonger and plan to explore this more in a later post, but this is what I should have told her when I had the chance in Indianapolis during the Women’s Final Four. I’ve edited and expanded it slightly from what I originally Tweeted:

“Print is not the future for women’s hoops coverage. I know, because I covered the sport for a major newspaper for many years. Then the newspaper business imploded. To assert that the mass media will, or should, devote more resources to a niche interest is ludicrous. Especially when better alternatives are available.

“The suggestion that coverage is ‘worse’ because of the decline of print — and the ever-present ’sexism’ that she and her ilk spout like they’re breathing air — is wrong-headed. I’ll blog more about this later, but on Saturday I sat next to Christine Brennan at a Women’s Final Four panel discussion about coverage of women’s basketball, and was taken aback by her dismissive attitude toward the ‘Internet.’ It is not a monolithic entity but the place where coverage of women’s hoops, like most niche topics, can and must flourish.

“Of course there is sexism there, but so what? You make of the Net what you want. It’s not a passive medium like print. This is 2011, but her tone came right from the late 1980s.

“There are two innovations that I’d suggest any fan of the sport, and students of new media, should look at: the Twitter account of @hoopfeed, which is a curated, constantly updated news wire that’s all women’s basketball. There’s nothing like it, and fans can’t get enough. If Christine would check it out, she’d see that there’s quite a bit of coverage of the game, and not just from newspapers.

“There’s also Inside Women’s Basketball, which is a very well-done quarterly women’s hoops online magazine that includes blog posts from Mel Greenberg, who created the first women’s poll in the late 1970s.

“The individuals behind these efforts and I and others have been talking about all this a lot since we’ve been here in Indy, and frankly we don’t have time to gripe about the way we think things should be. The Web, social media and especially mobile is where a burgeoning part of the women’s basketball audience — young girls and women who play the game — gets its news and information. It’s time to go there, instead of demanding they come to a place where few of them will ever go.

“The national dailies like Christine’s and the smaller papers, especially those in college towns, will follow women’s teams most extensively. But the major metro dailies like the one I used to work for are the missing element here. As much as I wish at times that I could have my old beat back, this new reality doesn’t have to be a bad thing.

“Marie Hardin of the sports journalism program at Penn State examined this issue recently in Nieman Reports, but I contend the focus is misplaced. If you’re always going to compare coverage of women’s sports to men’s, you’re always going to be disappointed. Perhaps some people feel the need to find something to gripe about (in women’s sports I call them The Sisters of Perpetual Indignance), but this is the wrong way to approach the subject.

I’d like to ask Christine (and Marie and anyone else who subscribes to their meme) to check out these new women’s hoops ventures and give them her support, but I rarely see her interact with her nearly 7,500 Twitter followers. So I doubt she’ll see this post, or even acknowledge it if she does.”

In what’s becoming an annual pre-Final Four media routine, Bloomberg has published what I regard as the most essential piece about the finances, marketing and outlook for big-time women’s college basketball that’s been written in some time.

But unlike some previous treatment of the same issue — such as this very good Big 12-oriented account by The Austin American-Statesman before last year’s Women’s Final Four in San Antonio — Bloomberg reporter Curtis Eichelberger’s examination goes beyond an emphasis on money and revenues and explores the realities facing those trying to broaden the sport’s appeal.

It’s an effort that’s obviously tied to money, but also illustrates the difficulties that the NCAA, conferences and various college athletic departments have faced in expanding its base audience.

Even Connecticut, which is gunning for its eighth NCAA championship this weekend at Conseco Fieldhouse in Indianapolis and has been the only women’s program to turn in a regular profit, is awash in red ink. Top programs are budgeted typically around $2 million to $4 million, with coaches like UConn’s Geno Auriemma and Pat Summitt of Tennessee pulling down low seven-figure salary packages.

A few excerpts that I think are worth keeping in mind, starting with comments from former NCAA women’s basketball committee chairwoman and Atlantic 10 commissioner Bernadette McGlade, a strong advocate for pushing the women’s game in the direction of profitability:

“There is intrinsic value in being able to carry your own weight. For the amount of resources going into intercollegiate women’s basketball, there’s going to be a time where there has to be a rational decision of, is it worth it? . . . It makes a difference whether you make money. It gives you a seat at the table where the decisions are made.”

Yet despite regular marketing and attendance initiatives, that scenario may not not realistic. Ohio State senior associate athletics director Ben Jay:

“I don’t foresee women’s basketball breaking even. We’d love it to. We are marketing the brand and pushing the program and all the fan experience elements. But we don’t see women’s basketball subsidizing other sports.”

The most important issue facing the women’s game from an exposure standpoint may be renewing the NCAA women’s basketball television package. The current 11-year, $163 million deal with ESPN, which includes a number of men’s and women’s non-revenue sports, expires at the end of the 2011-12 season. McGlade is in favor of pulling the women’s basketball component away from the other sports, Eichelberger reports, “no matter how small, and use that as a baseline to set new goals for developing the women’s television product.”

I certainly agree with that. Assessing the true media value of that product is a necessary step away from the current piggy-backing of women’s games that are tied to conference packages. I’ve had a senior administrator at a major conference tell me that it doesn’t place a financial value on its women’s package that is lumped in its all-sports contract. This individual wouldn’t speculate on what that dollar figure might be.

It’s time for this to change, and for the sport’s advocates to embrace what I’ve referred to as women’s hoops 3.0:

“This sport, and others women play, needs to attract more fans and more corporate and media support in order to gain a more durable foothold in a sports world still feeling the effects of the recession. Those with a professional stake in the advancement of women’s basketball recognize that those gains are no longer possible through political and social activism alone.

“The time in which we’re living now — with a concerted effort underway to ensure that women’s hoops, and women’s sports, will succeed as businesses — will help determine whether those young women will be able to live out their dreams.”

Perhaps I’m far too obsessive about this, and I know I will enjoy the games once they finally get underway Sunday night. I love the matchups that are on tap with Stanford vs. Texas A & M and UConn vs. Notre Dame. The splendid Maya Moore will conclude one of the greatest college basketball careers ever this weekend, with Stanford’s veteran squad, a spunky bunch of Aggies getting here for the first time and the fine young Irish point guard Skylar Diggins also featuring.

But the constant backdrop of social and cultural issues is bearing out my obsession. On Sunday morning’s “Outside the Lines” program on ESPN, the topic won’t be the basketball, or anything I’ve addressed here but the issue of transgender athletes. ESPN got Kye Allums, who is a male-identified member of the George Washington women’s team, to sit for an interview. I’ve been asked to appear on a panel discussion on the same program because of what I posted here last fall.

There’s nothing really new to report here, and I question OTL’s choice of subject matter on the same day of the biggest weekend in women’s college basketball, and that’s a point I’ll need to make on the air.

Especially when trying to bring the women’s game to new audiences remains so vexing, even for girls who already play. Says Rick Risinger, the Indianapolis-area high school coach of current UConn starter Kelly Faris:

“Boys have a tendency to watch a lot of basketball, whereas girls don’t tend to watch as much. The Final Four will open up and expose girls to basketball at a high level. This could set off a spark in some girls.”