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.

Ivan Maisel penned a thoughtful, fair-minded piece last week on ESPN.com about the Knight Commission — whose motto he tongue-in-cheek describes as “Tilting at Windmills since 1989″ — and the increasingly difficult challenge of advocating college athletics reform in an age when more money is flowing into big schools and major conferences than ever before.

The Knight Commission has picked up a number of allies along the way, including Title IX activists who still insist that football, in particular, is draining resources from women’s sports. Maisel points out that the body put the NCAA on its toes with such things as improving graduation rates for athletes. And yet:

“John Cheslock, the director of the Center for the Study of Higher Education at Penn State, told the Commission that television revenue has increased from $55-75 million in the mid-1980s to about $1 billion last year, an increase of more than 1,000 percent.

“In other words, the Commission knows how to defend the wishbone, and intercollegiate athletics is running the spread.”

This has been the case for many decades, even before the battle over television revenues between the NCAA and the Lords of College Football that led to a 1984 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that created the current climate of wall-to-wall games spread out over multiple outlets on fall Saturdays. And many Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday evenings this time of year as well.

Indeed, the real story of the rise of college athletics since World War II is centered around that saga, and so very well-told by Alabama sportswriter Keith Dunnavant in his excellent 2004 book, “The Fifty-Year Seduction: How Television Manipulated College Football, from the Birth of the Modern NCAA to the Creation of the BCS.”

Sports Illustrated’s Andy Staples wrote a terrific piece along these lines back in August, updating the timeline with new TV contracts, the realignment that has ensued and the entrepreneurial ethos of Pac 12 commissioner Larry Scott now driving the commercial landscape of college athletics.

Reformers have always been at least several steps behind what they’re trying to rein in, usually for deeply philosophical reasons. But the advocacy of pure amateurism and education-first pushed by the Knight Commission, the NCAA, gender equity leaders and others forlorn about rampant commercialism in college athletics belies their own conflicted realities with money, prestige and competitive ambitions.

While it’s not surprising for Brit Kirwan, the chancellor of the University of Maryland system, to sound the alarm bell about higher and higher finances in college athletics, there’s a puzzling lack of a larger perspective about rampant spending in the rest of the higher education structure.

The Chronicle of Higher Education cited research this summer showing that nearly half of the nation’s colleges and universities are close to, or are headed toward, an “unsustainable financial path.” (That analysis, by the way, was prepared by Bain & Company, the consultancy where Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney made his fortune.)

While that may sound alarmist, higher education leaders who wring their hands about paying $5 million a year for a football coach are just as tone-deaf about runaway tuition costs and the inability of many families to afford college. The risks of taking out hefty student loans and the crushing debt obligations that can hound graduates for decades are becoming too great for many young people and their parents to bear, especially with an uncertain economic future.

Before we can have an honest discussion about being prudent in the athletics department, this conversation must first take place in the main administration building.

Women’s sports advocates fought bitter battles with college football leaders three and four decades ago, at the dawn of the age of Title IX, just to squeeze out a few dollars to pay for new programs demanded by the law. Those fights sowed the seeds of distrust that remain, even though the commercial growth of college football and men’s college basketball has helped women’s sports to flourish at the highest levels. As former Stanford athletics director Ted Leland told Maisel, referencing the success of American women Olympians in London:

“The BCS schools are 25 percent of Division I, and they are providing about 100 percent of Olympic-level athletes in women’s sports. It’s a by-product of the huge influx of money from football.”

But for Title IX leaders to admit this would mean minimizing an “enemy” they need to further their advocacy. There’s plenty of red ink produced by football, as The Birmingham News recently reported about the public subsidies handed out to non-BCS athletics programs in the state of Alabama (including Troy, my alma mater). But women’s advocates would rather use that data to continue to demonize “King Football” than to acknowledge where the money comes from to pay for women’s programs — and basketball coaching salaries are the notable examples here — that will likely never be close to revenue-producing.

As for the NCAA, its decision on Monday to withdraw five national championship competitions from New Jersey because of that state’s new sports wagering law speaks volumes about what many will claim are its numerous hypocrisies.

The dispute involves legal action against the state from not just the NCAA, but professional sports leagues as well, and it figures to get even uglier.

But later on Monday USA Today reported that the NCAA, which is paying its top leaders more than their predecessors, has around $500 million in net assets. Not bad for a tax-exempt organization that professes to uphold the highest values of amateur sports and higher education. While NCAA staffers I have come to know are hard-working, humble people devoted to ensuring positive experiences for “student-athletes,” the top leadership of the organization has never been more out of touch with what those values really are.

Money will do that do you, of course, and it’s richly ironic that the NCAA is under increasing pressure to share its vast sums with the uncompensated athletes whose exploits have created this wealth.

Those sounding the loudest calls for reform have been unable to reconcile their purist, for-the-love-of-it ideals with the commercial realities that have engulfed the entire higher educational and college athletics enterprise.

That’s because they’ve been engulfed by this predicament too, and that doesn’t appear to be changing anytime soon.

Keeping tabs on which country is “winning” the Olympics — and we know which country this is — is one of the most jingoistic activities of an already jingoistic event, at least what is presented to American viewers.

Much has been made about the success of U.S. women athletes at the London Olympics, and there is quite a bit to celebrate. From gymnastics to women’s soccer and now boxing, the triumphs of American females at these Games were noteworthy.

Whether it’s Gabby or Alex, Missy or Candace, Sanya or Abby, they’re “our girls,” the newly-minted heroines of Olympic glory, as important to American medal collection as the men. The “Title IX Olympics,” some have proclaimed. In fact, this Tweet was making its rounds quite frequently:

“If US Women were a country, they would be ranked 3rd in Medal Count. Thank you Title IX.”

In the myopia of American culture, especially when it comes to the Olympics, this means that women have now become an integral part of the jingoistic narrative of how we will officially remember London.

This began early during the Olympics with the Stenographer of the Sisterhood, naturally, who clucked as only she can::

“The last grouchy anti-Title IX holdouts must have succumbed by now. Either that or they are hiding in their closets. Americans love to win more than anything else, and the nation’s greatest winners are now women.”

To not wax euphoric about what she does, of course, is to be “anti-Title IX,” and suggesting otherwise was implied repeatedly to those of us in supposedly resistant precincts by the American sports media herd in London.

None could be bothered to point out that Title IX has had absolutely no impact on quite a number of these sports, most notably gymnastics, tennis and boxing. Teen swimming sensations Missy Franklin and Katie Ledecky are where they are — just as Janet Evans was nearly 25 years ago — because of superb club training programs more than scholastic sports, which limits their time in the pool and access to world-class competition.

This is not to diminish what Title IX has produced, but to illustrate that it’s never been the predominant factor in some sports, contrary to the assertions of women’s sports advocates and journalists pandering to an easy storyline.

The second portion of the above quote is more to the point. The maturity of women’s sports in the U.S. is feeding into our “winning” culture, which attracts all-important media and corporate sponsorship attention that improves mainstream standing. Title IX has been an important vehicle to an end that, when you think of it, runs counter to what the law was supposed to be about.

That’s an irony that will always be missed by the celebratory American media. What also isn’t being written is how truly gargantuan the gap between U.S. women athletes and female athletes around the world has become. The London Olympics revealed that the American Olympic industry — for men and women — is as strong as it has ever been. That’s the real difference, as much, if not more, than the long-term effects of Title IX.

Meanwhile, for female athletes in other countries, who in some cases were trotted out as tokens for Western media consumption, or were seen as victims of the “gender police” for other cultural reasons, their prospects don’t appear to be all that brighter with the London Games complete.

Outgoing IOC president Jacques Rogge hasn’t exactly been a paragon for gender equality in his tenure. But he is a realist, as he showed Sunday when asked about the next steps for the progress of women in sports, at least outside the United States:

“We are going to continue to discuss with the local authorities and sports ministries and try to find strategies and solutions to improve the situation.

“It will take time. The ideal situation will not be found tomorrow. This is work for probably a decade at least to see major improvements.”

In the understandable excitement over the female American exceptionalism demonstrated in London, these comments will be utterly forgotten — if they were noted at all — on these shores.

Today’s excerpt from my new book: “Beyond Title IX: The Cultural Laments of Women’s Sports,” details a prominent Title IX blogger’s first bout with media attention not that many years ago. But the national notoriety surrounding the Pink Locker Room at the University of Iowa is something that Erin Buzuvis does not mention these days, and it’s easy to understand why:

In 2005, while serving as a visiting law professor at the University of Iowa, Erin Buzuvis was horrified to discover that the visitors’ locker room at Kinnick Stadium was awash in light pink paint. Indeed, it was a very calming shade ordered up in the 1980s by former football coach Hayden Fry as a psychological ploy. It worked very, very well.

The late Michigan football coach Bo Schembechler hated the locker room for competitive reasons. Buzuvis hated it for cultural reasons, and on a blog furnished for her by the Iowa law school, she denounced it as a symbol of misogyny and homophobia (the post was soon deleted). As she later explained to an Associated Press reporter in Cedar Rapids:

“With a pink locker room, you’re saying that ‘You are a girlie man. You are weak like a girl.’ That implies that girls are non-dominant, therefore, lesser. And that is offensive.”

Hawkeye Nation went berserk, as Iowa football fans vigorously attacked her on message boards and blogs, with some regrettably making death threats and posting other vulgarities.

The story went nationwide, as the protests of Buzuvis and Jill Gaulding, another Iowa law professor, became a laughingstock. “Research shows brains pick up stereotypes like sponges soak up water,” insisted Gaulding. “One solution to reducing stereotypes, especially negative ones, is to not have them around.”

Buzuvis continued to insist that the pink locker room “belittles every female athlete out there,” although it’s doubtful she polled even one to reach her conclusion.

Iowa football coach Kirk Ferentz was at a loss for words: “I wish I had enough time to think about it. . . . But I really haven’t burned a lot of brain cells on it.”

This section of the book details the origins of the “football as the enemy” complaints by some women’s sports advocates that later led to a more general broadside against the “hegemonic masculinity” that rules American sports culture. Another Title IX legal expert, Deborah Brake, has alleged that the law is about more than “the place of women in sports” but also “the meaning of gender.”

Title IX is not what really gets her cracking in the morning, but a means toward a narrow cultural ideal.

Buzuvis, who now professes law on the East Coast, has ditched the worst of her academic verbiage on her blog. On Monday, her sidekick posted this about regarding calls to drop football from the Title IX calculations:

“Judy Dixon has said she’s tired of fighting football. A lot of us are tired of fighting football — or heck patriarchy in general — but it doesn’t mean we just capitulate.”

This a classic example of a sports feminist establishment whose ideas are hoisted as mainstream and are therefore considered unassailable. Peel away a layer or two, and you will find something very different.

The deluge of celebratory media coverage in recent weeks over the 40th anniversary of the enactment of Title IX has been remarkable.

I’ve commented on this blog about the flood the zone coverage of espnW, and what has been missing from its narrative.

On  Saturday, ESPN Classic filled in some of that gap with a substantive documentary, “The Battle of Title IX,” that did more than cheerlead about the women’s sports revolution and airbrush away controversy over how the law is being enforced. It tackled the issue head on, treating the concerns of displaced male athletes with respect, instead of using it to blame “King Football.”

The same goes for a package of articles from “Only a Game,” NPR’s weekly sports program. “Title IX’s Impact on Men’s Sports” is the second most popular link on the website of WBUR, the Boston NPR affiliate that is “Only a Game’s” home base.

These are longstanding issues that will not go away, no matter how much the Title IX establishment wants to ignore them.

But as I wrote last year in my blog series “Women’s Sports Without Illusions,” there’s so much more to women’s sports than Title IX. Producing that series inspired me to expand on those ideas, and I’m proud to announce I’ve just published an e-book on the subject.

“Beyond Title IX: The Cultural Laments of Women’s Sports,” explores, as the title indicates, more than just the controversial application of the law.

These issues include fairly recent complaints about a pink football locker room at a Big Ten university and a Sports Illustrated cover photo of a fully clothed champion female skier as an unwitting phallic symbol, as well as cries of media “invisibility” as women athletes are seen on television more than ever.

There are also continuing denials of undeniable physiological differences between men and women, and as a result, growing calls for the wall of sex-segregated sports to be torn down completely.

This litany of grievance gives women’s sports a bad name, far more than protracted battles over Title IX ever have. You may not have heard much about this, since many of the individuals I profile in this book are regarded by the mainstream media as “experts” in Title IX and “scholars” of women’s sports. In truth, they are ideologues who peddle dubious theories based on women as an oppressed class, rather than as individuals making their own decisions about how they experience sports in their own lives.

In that sense, these leading figures of women’s sports have flouted the spirit of a movement that has lost its way. I will have excerpts from the book posted here the rest of the week, starting with the first part of the book, “The Paradox of Equality,” which explains how even leading women in sports have struggled over the years to define what equality in sports is supposed to mean:

“The continuing problem with Title IX isn’t that there is a law, or a need for enforcement. It’s about how this is to be done, 40 years after its passage, and three decades after the creation of sports compliance regulations that have largely done their job.

“Title IX was never meant to exact a numerical result. The stalwart work of activists and friendly courts has flouted the true intent and spirit of the law, with the Brown case serving as a tipping point.

“Instead of abiding by what Congress had in mind when it passed the law, activists today condemn any suggestion of reworking the sports regulations — not the statute — as heresy, as an attempt to ‘weaken’ Title IX and set back women’s sports. They are hysterical, they are loud, they get mainstream media outlets to do their bidding and they dial up a slew of lawyers as they did when they were fighting justified battles two and three decades ago.

“But American society has evolved more than they will acknowledge. The most powerful entities in college athletics know that women’s sports is here to stay, and our history of social progress has always included a re-evaluation of laws and regulations.

“After all, the civil rights, feminist and gay rights movements in America have fought to strike down laws and court rulings that were unjust and immoral and treated individuals in those groups as second-class citizens. Revising the Title IX sports regulations to reflect where women athletes are now, and not the 1970s, is a needed step firmly with the future in mind, while activists remain stuck firmly in the past.”

For the price of an iced double tall frappa-foo-foo coffee whatever, you can buy the whole book. If you’re a member of Amazon Prime, it’s free. Regardless, I would like to know what you think.

I haven’t benefitted from Title IX in a sports context, and readers here certainly know I’ve got problems with the way the sports compliance provisions are being enforced by the courts.

But this terrific video compiled by World Team Tennis is the perfect tribute to a woman who has done so much more than to advocate for Title IX. Billie Jean King’s impact on women — and men — is far greater than a law will ever be. This certainly has been the case for me.

She questioned why things were the way they were for female athletes and for women in society, and did something heroic about it.

It’s perfectly understandable to go back down memory lane with the 40th anniversary of Title IX approaching and recall what women’s sports were like in the 1970s.

I know this, because I was playing in fledgling youth sports leagues at the time, limited to slow-pitch softball and six-on-six basketball. That was all we had, but those memories — and they were blissful ones — have been on my mind a lot not just in the last few weeks, but as I have gotten older and tried to understand what they have meant to my life.

I understand why there have been so many accounts of the women rowers at Yale who stripped down to nothing in the mid-1970s to protest the lack of facilities and resources that their male counterparts took for granted.

Even if these happy media chroniclers haven’t written at all about the female athletes who fired the first shot across the bow for their rights under Title IX, I understand. Three years before the Yale rowers, several young women college tennis players sued other women, those leading the first intercollegiate athletic governing body for women, but who thought that women athletes shouldn’t be allowed scholarships.

Not a word about any of this has been uttered during this “celebratory” time, but I understand why. It would dash the familiar narrative of men — and only men — standing in the way of progress for women in sports. The fuller history of women in sports is more than pock-marked with decades of resistance from women sports leaders, but there is no room for any of this now. Or ever.

Aside from that, the memories and recollections and perspectives from so many individuals — athletes, coaches, administrators, activists, parents and others — have been useful in helping those of younger generations appreciate how much progress has been made in such a short amount of time.

What’s becoming almost unbearable are the shrieks from the Title IX establishment — including some prominent media types — that we must continue to “fight” as though this were still the 1970s.

On today’s espnW — the official benefactor of the Women’s Sports Foundation — columnist Johnette Howard has continued her employers’ continuing stenography on this issue.

In particular, Howard fumes about the recent decision by a conservative Catholic school in Arizona not to play in a state championship baseball team because its opponent included a female player:

“That happened in 2012 America. The same 2012 America that has a pretty roiling political debate about whether there’s a ‘war on women’ over everything from birth control to workplace rights to, well, you name it.”

Of course. The “war on women.” I may be more liberal than Howard, and I deeply despise the gender politics of the right, but this is ridiculous. Title IX has always been about politics, and the flawed way in which it is being enforced in sports reflects the political agenda of the Title IX establishment.

I understand that, too.

But Howard points to the example of Paige Sultzbach to conjure up a phony existing “war” on Title IX, a law she says has amazingly endured “given the sustained, occasionally ingenious, sometimes mean-spirited, sneaky and downright cynical attempts to roll it back or scrub it from the books completely.”

While there were stalwart opponents of Title IX and its sports regulations in the 1970s and into the 1980s, those foes — the NCAA and the lords of college football — were conquered long ago. All that’s left are a few individuals and groups who want to revamp the regulations and change the current interpretation of the law away from one that places an emphasis on proportionality, on numbers.

They’re not talking about scrubbing it from the books. They’re not being “mean-spirited” in pointing out that the focus on numbers has been at a great cost to some male athletes in some sports. Critics of the interpretation — not Title IX — are talking about making it work to reflect the intent and spirit of Congress when it passed the law (without any mention of sports) that President Nixon signed 40 years ago on Saturday.

It’s one thing to remember the past, and to learn from the examples of women’s sports pioneers, and to appreciate what exists now. I may never agree with some of them on Title IX, but I do respect their passion and their tenacity for their cause.

It’s another thing altogether to continue to fight the past, as though we were still living in it. I’m sure Howard remembers the 1970s, as I do. To be honest, I had almost forgotten about disco music until the recent deaths of Donna Summer and Robin Gibb.

I’m not trying to be flip here, but to point out that perpetual indignation can work against your own best interests. Too many high-profile women’s sports leaders, such as former Women’s Sports Foundation CEO Donna Lopiano, remain stuck in the 1970s, still bristling about what they didn’t have, as she reiterated again this week:

“I don’t think anyone could have envisioned the kind of reality we have today. It’s hard to envision a future you never had.”

And she’s regarded as one of the true visionaries of women’s sports. I didn’t have much more in the ways of opportunities than Lopiano did, but this is a perfect example of why the present tone of advocacy, as well as the Title IX regulations, have to change with the future in mind.

I tried to shake some cobwebs loose about this a year ago in my series “Women’s Sports Without Illusions.”

I’ve updated those posts in a new project that I will be unveiling here very soon. So please stay tuned.

ESPN The Magazine’s Peter Keating laid out a case on espnW this week for changes in NCAA scholarship allocation limits that he asserts is “the silent enemy” of men’s non-revenue sports.

There are some interesting numbers here, and he does make a good point in suggesting that raising scholarship limits in non-revenue sports “may be the only way to amplify their voices in the ongoing debates over how to reform college athletics.”

But for the most part, this is another example of glorified Title IX stenography from espnW, which has already parroted amply from its official benefactor, the Women’s Sports Foundation, on the supposed “myths” of Title IX that come from critics of the law’s sports regulations.

Previously, I pulled apart an espnW “expose” called “The Glass Wall,” about the alleged grim prospects of women coaches, due mainly to sexism and homophobia. I called it a crock then, and it’s still a crock and always will be.

Keating is another experienced journalist put on espnW’s massive Title IX initiative, and it’s glaring how eagerly he dismisses anyone who disagrees with the Title IX establishment. Throw out a bunch of numbers and it’s hard to cut through the stale dogma he’s serving up.

Keating also makes sure to point out that critics of the Title IX regulations — whom he incorrectly assumes are all “opponents” of the statute — are “scapegoating the law” when men’s teams are cut.

The American Sports Council, which is critical of the Title IX proportionality provision, protested furiously on its Saving Sports blog, complaining that espnW didn’t provide the organization an opportunity to respond.

I won’t dig into those arguments here; ASC spokesman Jim McCarthy gets right to the point. But that rejection shouldn’t be surprising, given espnW’s zeal to perpetuate a narrative about Title IX that allows for no scrutiny of the sports regulations, more than 30 years after they were enacted and on the 40th anniversary of the passage of the law.

While Keating is described as an investigative reporter who also covers “statistical subjects,” much of the numbers-based argument he makes is a smokescreen. I don’t see how reallocating more scholarships to non-revenue sports will have any impact on college athletics reform; does he notice how much more college football is steering the ship with constant conference realignment and even richer television contracts? The men’s non-revenue side will continue to be vulnerable to cuts because of the way Title IX is being enforced in the courts.

Indeed, the biggest omission from Keating’s analysis is that scholarship reallocations, even the flexible options he proposes, essentially don’t address the Title IX numbers game that schools must play to avoid being sued.

For getting right with proportionality isn’t about how many men or women are on scholarship, or whether football, an all-male sport with big rosters, could stand to get another haircut to help out lacrosse and tennis and baseball.

When it comes to the Title IX sports regulation that matters above all, it’s about whether the female athletic headcount — the raw sports participation number of that “underrepresented” gender — closely matches the female undergraduate student enrollment percentage at a given school.

That’s how the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights compiles its data, and what prompts litigious organizations like the Women’s Sports Foundation and the Women’s National Law Center to threaten and file lawsuits.

If Keating and his espnW editors had been the least bit interested in a truly dispassionate approach to this subject, it might have made for some more interesting reading than another predictable complaint about the presumed  gluttony of football.

I’ve not found many more refreshing athletes to cover than Brandi Chastain.

And I’ve never been enamored with Republican politicians whose voting records are a predictable laundry list of all the issues, economic and social, that I couldn’t be more opposed to.

But when California Assemblyman Chris Norby expressed his concern this week over court interpretations of Title IX, it became a national story, and for all the wrong reasons.

With Chastain in the House chamber for a 40th anniversary Title IX recognition ceremony, Norby soured the celebrations with some rare public candor:

“We need to be honest about the effects of what I believe are faulty court interpretations or federal enforcement of Title IX, because it has led to the abolition of many male sports across the board in [California’s public universities]. And that was never the intention of this, to have numerical equality. It was never the intention to attain equality by reducing opportunities for the men.”

Chastain couldn’t say anything because Norby was not speaking at a public hearing. Instead, she winced, in an image that was widely reproduced in news outlets all across America.

A sampling of the breathless media response to someone saying something so terrible about Title IX:

Chastain “managed not to blow her top.” She even “kept her cool.” On the other hand, she “bristles.”

Can someone actually be all those things at the same time? Especially if there’s wincing involved? Ah, I digress.

According to the OC Weekly, Norby “inserts soccer shoe in mouth.”

ESPN.com: “Brandi Chastain winces at Title IX flak.”

Poor Brandi! Muzzled! By Flak!

The San Jose Mercury News wrote that Chastain “had to endure” Norby’s remark, adding that “it’s shameful that there are still people out there who think Title IX was a bad thing.”

Except that Norby neither said nor implied such a thing. He made it clear he objected to compliance methods that call for numerical provisions to achieve “equality,” which he accurately pointed out was not the original intent of the law, or the sports regulations that came later.

(If you want to get an idea of the absurd ramifications of a 1993 California NOW Title IX consent decree affecting sports programs at public universities in that state, here’s a recent example.)

Norby didn’t say anything about scuttling the law. But he learned that if you question the Title IX establishment at all, you’re in for a snoot full of blowback.

The Title IX blog: “Brandi Chastain witnesses backlash.” The predictable gender feminist term, trotted out right on cue, and reflexively used to describe any dissenting response to the party line.

Norby is a Republican from the conservative hotbed of Orange County, where he was a supervisor before being elected to Sacramento. I could not imagine ever voting for the so-called “wonk of the right,” especially with so many elected officials of similar ilk in my midst in the Deep South. But I share enough of a libertarian bent to see that he was able to get to the heart of the argument often made by critics of Title IX:

Title IX is a good law, with a bad interpretation.

This is my complaint; not the statute itself. The need for the law remains, because inequities do exist. The way it is being enforced has had a harmful effect on some male athletes in some sports. Not all, and not across the board. But the impact has been strong enough to warrant a closer examination that the Title IX powers-that-be simply will not tolerate.

Norby was condemned not just for what he said, but for saying anything at all.

Later, Chastain was interviewed by The Daily, explaining that her response to Norby would have been this:

“I think there’s missed perspective on what Title IX is. It’s not men’s sports against women’s sports. Let’s be honest about this — men’s football is a big money machine and so there’s a lot of money spent and other sports don’t have the luxury of spending it.”

Unmuzzled, at last!

Of course. It’s all football’s fault. The “other sports” don’t make the money; I invite Chastain or anyone else still clinging to this narrative to check out the high cost of non-revenue sports, for men and women, just at the University of Minnesota. This is where real “arms race” in college sports gets alarming.

The Daily story closed out with an interesting observation from Chastain about the need to “revisit”  the law “on a regular basis, [since] there will be people who don’t understand the history or where it comes from and that’s dangerous.”

I’ve been calling for that for a good long while, making specific suggestions about reworking Title IX here and here that might get the compliance methods back to what the law had in mind in the first place.

For Title IX absolutists, however, “revisiting” the issue isn’t about giving it a critical look. It’s about having another chance to restate their talking points about the law, and daring anyone to disagree.

Last week USA Today wrote about the growing popularity of flag football for girls in high schools, especially in Florida, where it is a state championship sport.

Flag football also has been introduced at the varsity level in Washington, D.C., and is growing as a club sport in parts of Texas.

More girls coming out to play sports — this is a good thing, no?

No, if you’re an official mouthpiece for a leading women’s organization. Neena Chaudhry, senior counsel, National Women’s Law Center:

“You can add sports as recreational or intramural — it’s great to have activities to help girls be physically active. If you’re going to add a varsity sport, it is relevant if that sport is going to provide the same opportunities as the boys have. So, to then add flag football as opposed to a sport, like volleyball or soccer, that does allow girls to get college scholarships is not equitable.”

Nancy Hogshead-Makar, director of advocacy for the Women’s Sports Foundation, echoes Chaudhry:

“The thing that makes sports valuable is having a goal and postponing the short-term. If you want to have fun, you don’t train for the Olympics. What purpose would anybody have to swim four hours a day if they didn’t have a long-term goal?”

Hold on now. I’ve never seen anywhere in my reading of Title IX a stipulation about high school sports being added to accommodate athletic scholarships at the college level. Just because flag football doesn’t translate doesn’t mean it should be nixed from consideration in high schools for Title IX purposes.

On the other hand, women’s sports activists have endorsed the addition of college sports for women — such as rugby and bowling — that have little to no interest or organization at the high school level, just to meet Title IX demands.

Both of these women are lawyers, and I’ve heard them and others like them say often that the law is meant simply to give females an opportunity to play. It says nothing at all about whether such activity is required to be a gateway to a college scholarship.

The reaction of these activists smacks of the fight over varsity cheerleading at Quinnipiac University. A federal judge ruled in 2010 that it wasn’t a sport for Title IX purposes, satisfying the urgings of women’s sports activists when the Connecticut school dropped its women’s volleyball program.

The latest crusade from the NWLC is to go after school districts that aren’t doing right by Title IX, and here are some school districts that are trying to address those disparities. We have two activities here, in cheerleading and flag football, that are generating some considerable interest from young females, and the activists are resisting this.

Is it because these sports are considered just a bit too traditionally feminine?