Some Men's Teams Are in Peril in Division I-A
From The Chronicle of Higher Education - June 18, 2004
By WELCH SUGGS

Having a big-time college football team is getting more expensive -- and not just in dollars spent.

For the second year in a row, the number of male athletes declined precipitously at the 54 colleges that field Division I-A football teams but that are excluded from the lucrative Bowl Championship Series. And, for the first time, the number of female athletes at those institutions was down slightly, too.

Colleges belonging to the Presidential Coalition on Athletics Reform lost an average of 27 male athletes from 2001-2 to 2002-3, as the number of men declined from 257 to 230 per institution. The average number of women dropped from 171 to 168.

Karl Benson, commissioner of the Western Athletic Conference, said his institutions had not made him aware of a trend of major cutbacks in sports. However, he noted, two of them, California State University at Fresno and Southern Methodist University, have dropped men's sports in the past two years.

"Obviously the financial gap that exists [between BCS and coalition members] continues to widen, and the financial challenges that WAC schools are under are becoming more and more difficult," he said. "Yet I don't sense that the decisions being made are specific to Title IX and gender-equity motives. They're simply a matter of trying to manage the resources that are available."

Colleges that belong to the Bowl Championship Series conferences saw no such drop; their numbers are holding steady. Among Division I-AA members, which play football with fewer scholarships and lower costs, the average number of male athletes dropped by seven per institution, and the average number of women held steady.

Some of the figures are probably distorted by the fact that The Chronicle obtained gender-equity data from the U.S. Education Department instead of directly from the institutions themselves. The Education Department form is slightly different from the NCAA form used by colleges in the past.

Even so, eight Division I institutions announced last year that they would drop men's sports. And a study by Christine H.B. Grant, former director of women's athletics at the University of Iowa, found that the majority of NCAA members dropping men's teams were Division I-A colleges that were outside the six Bowl Championship Series leagues, which provide their members with millions of dollars each year in television royalties and football bowl-game contracts.

The cost of doing business in Division I-A continues to rise. Outside the BCS, colleges spent an average of $15-million each on athletics, up from $14-million a year earlier. BCS members, who belong to the Atlantic Coast, Big East, Big Ten, Big 12, Pacific-10, or Southeastern Conferences, spent an average of $35-million, also up about a million dollars from the previous year.

That has profound implications for gender equity.

One of the most common measures of compliance with Title IX is whether a college has roughly the same proportion of female athletes and female students. If it does, it is in a "safe harbor" for meeting the law's requirements, according to court rulings and Education Department guidelines.

Among BCS members, student populations were split almost evenly between men and women, but only 44 percent of athletes were women, meaning that the proportion of female athletes trailed that of female students by six percentage points.

Division I-A colleges outside the BCS had a greater proportion of female students (55 percent), but a slightly smaller proportion of female athletes (43.6 percent), amounting to a difference of 11 percentage points.

At Division I colleges without football teams, athletes were split almost exactly 50-50.

But student populations were nearly 58 percent female, meaning that female athletes are better-represented at BCS universities than at those that have no football.