Just to be very clear- Personally? I am completely indifferent to football. No member of my family has ever played football or even watches football. In fact I am not a sports fan in any way, never have been. I am only in recent years a gymnastics fan of sorts- quite a lazy one- because my kids are gymnasts.
My post was not a defense of football as a sport. I am pointing out it is incorrect to blame football programs for the reduction in other men’s sports programs or the dramatic demise of some men’s sports in America that occurred after passage of Title IX.
No sport offered exclusively for women eats up anything remotely close to football's average roster of 103 men. If a university is to provide equal opportunities for men and women to play sports, the calculation of numbers of athletes and costs will force a decision between football and other men's sports. It's simple math. Once you do that math, then you can start thinking about whether a school should field a football team and a couple other men's sports or field a wider array of men's sports. .
Exactly. It
is simple math. The result of the law- perhaps not in how it is written but as a result of how it has been enforced and implemented- is a de facto quota system. So yes, choices had to be made- because of Title IX. But this does not make the loss of other men's sport teams football's fault- If a college is given a Sophie's choice, the surviving child cannot be blamed for the result.
I also dislike the “it’s football’s fault” argument because it pits one sport and its athletes against another. All over this country there are boys who work hard and dream of playing college football- just as our gymnast sons work hard and may dream of being college gymnasts. I do not like the "my sport is better than your sport" game when the consequence for the loser is elimination by federal statute.
A simple solution would have been to exempt football programs from Title IX. I made the case in my other post for why football is unique and an obvious outlier when it comes to college sport programs. And as you say, it has no significant female equivalent or counterpart. Taking football programs out of the equation would have allowed universities to increase athletic opportunities for women just as they have since passage of IX, while maintaining them for men.
I would also add that I understand that several factors might come into play when a university decides to eliminate a sports program. Measures of popularity and success for example. But I would argue that here again, the trail of destruction leads back to Title IX.
When a sport as a whole loses college teams, this impacts every facet of the sport. Fewer college teams means fewer athletes stay with the sport. This means both fewer coaches coming up through the ranks, and a smaller high level athlete pool, which leads to a reduction in international success in that sport for the country. This lack of success reduces the sport's overall popularity. Fewer coaches and lower popularity causes a reduction in pre-college boys gymnastics programs, and the surviving college programs become even less popular and successful and all that more ripe for the chopping block. So, even more college teams are eliminated, there are even fewer coaches, even less international success, even less popularity- more college teams are eliminated- and on and on. This is how the result if not the intent of Title IX was to send men's gymnastics in the US into a death spiral.