Thirty years after the passage of Title IX, the boys club at the heart of intercollegiate sports is complaining as loudly as ever about lost athletic opportunities for men. Meanwhile, the girls club at the heart of intercollegiate sports complains that the statute still isn't being enforced while fretting that it'll be weakened by a future interpretation.
In short, Title IX is excellent law that the Clinton administration's education department interpreted way too bluntly. It needs fine tuning, which shouldn't be real tough so long as we can stay clear about a distinction between equality of opportunity and equality of results.
Equality of opportunity is commendable and necessary in a truly free society. Equality of results is a beautiful ideal that becomes a dangerous contrivance when pushed to its limit as the only good end in itself.
By the letter, athletic departments are in compliance so long as they show they're increasing athletic opportunities for women, prove they're meeting the athletic interests and needs of female students or demonstrate that the percentage of its female athletes is roughly equal to the percentage of its female undergraduates. The Clinton administration's 1996 ruling pointed to the last of these as the safe haven for being sure of compliance.
Notoriously, a couple of problems arise. First, the notion of "participation" is severe and unreasonable, enforcing equality of results by subtracting opportunities for men. If 54 percent of the undergraduates at the university are women, then women's programs should receive 54 percent of the athletic budgets and 54 percent of the athletic scholarships. That should be the standard for compliance.
But the present interpretation says roughly 54 percent of the university's intercollegiate athletes should be women. At this point, many say, we're trying to enforce results that are actually disproportionate with women's actual interest in playing sports. Now there's a good chance that isn't true, since women have increasingly participated with increased opportunity.
But 28 percent of the universities in the NCAA have been goaded by the participation requirement into cutting lightly funded men's sports in which the athletes receive partial scholarships, if anything. Why not just let the men's sports have 46 percent of the athletic funds and scholarships, then let walk-ons play without counting them against the percentage of participants? That way, the women have proportionate resources without having to eliminate men from participation.
It should be noted that even by the standard being advocated here, college sports, as a whole, fall well short of compliance. NCAA figures for 2000-01 show that men's programs received 60.5 percent of the scholarships, 64.5 percent of the operating expenses, 68.2 percent of the recruiting expenses and 59.5 percent of the head coaching salaries -- even though 54 percent of the undergraduate students are women.
That brings us to the more famous problem, which is, of course, that football gobbles up so many scholarships and so much money that the other men's sports are left with relatively little. For the few major universities that go to the lucrative bowl games and profit from the big television contracts, it makes a certain amount of sense and allows them to fund fully compliant athletic programs. But most universities can't play it that way.
Even with football -- or, in some cases, especially because of football -- fewer than 5 percent of athletic departments are profitable, according to NCAA statistics. But it's too easy to say universities should just cut back expenditures on football and allocate the savings to other sports.
A football team has residual benefits for a university that no other sport can claim. It's widely believed, for example, that alumni contributions rise and fall with the fortunes of the football team. And in some parts of the country, unfortunately, the football team promotes the university's reputation like nothing else.
Doubtless, some athletic departments overspend on football, cut other men's sports for budgetary reasons and hide behind Title IX as the reason. Doubtless, as well, many athletic directors are under pressure to bring their football programs to prominence for the reasons given above, among others. But if we relax the participation standard as recommended, then the dodge won't be available, women can have proportionate resources and athletic departments still can play football for its perceived advantages.
That scenario still would require a lot of change, and football programs would be forced to economize. But it would be obtuse to argue that football is more important than proportionate opportunity for women.
More fundamentally, it's just perverse to say women shouldn't receive proportionate funds or that a university man paying his own way shouldn't be able to wrestle. On the 30th anniversary of Title IX, it could do with another look.
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The end of June has become an intermission to the athletic year, with only the World Cup to save us from a useless slate of baseball exhibitions, another major golf championship for Tiger Woods or a stuffy old tennis tournament in England. Even taking into account today's thin offerings, it would suit this corner just fine if the baseball players had struck in June, just to kill interleague play for the year.
The interleague games are winding down, and it's safe to return to your Extra Innings subscription with less fear of happening on a game between the Texas Rangers and Pittsburgh Pirates, or some similar mutation. By the start of next week, we'll be back to baseball games that will allow us to forget that Major League Baseball has hopelessly lost its way.
Unfortunately, the effects of interleague play will be forever etched in the standings, which is to say the scheduling inequities are likely to play in the wild card races. Seven years after the beginning of expanded playoffs and five years after the start of interleague play, it's still hard to believe or accept that baseball has defaced itself with the necessity of those terms.
Through Sunday, the Oakland Athletics were 14-1 in interleague games against the weak sisters of the National League Central, which has to be the worst division in the game this summer. Meanwhile, the Boston Red Sox were 5-10, facing the much stronger National League West and the Atlanta Braves, who have been designated as their interleague rival. Though the Red Sox still held a three-game lead on Oakland in the wild card standings, the fact remains that Oakland gained a full nine games on Boston with no common interleague opponents between them.
Oakland's interleague opponents were the Reds, the Pirates, the Houston Astros, the Milwaukee Brewers and their local rival, the San Francisco Giants. While the A's feasted on that easy schedule, Boston was set up to play the three best clubs in the National League -- the Braves, Arizona Diamondbacks and Los Angeles Dodgers -- with two series against the Braves.
The Reds, in particular, have been hammered by interleague play, which seemed to be a little bit useful so long as they were set up every year to play the Cleveland Indians. But the Reds don't even get that. Instead, playing against the tough American League West, the Reds lost 10 of 12 interleague games.
Among the Reds' interleague opponents were three clubs -- Oakland, the Seattle Mariners and the Anaheim Angeles -- the worst of which is on a pace to win 94 games. Meanwhile, the Montreal Expos have gone 11-4 in interleague play against the Chicago White Sox, the Detroit Tigers, the Toronto Blue Jays, the Kansas City Royals and the Cleveland Indians. The best of those clubs is on a pace to win 78 games.
Stretched to their limit on the starting pitching staff, the Reds have been trashed not just in the National League Central race but even in the wild card race. The Reds lost six games to the St. Louis Cardinals during interleague play and stood 3 games behind the Cardinals as of June 25. The Reds also lost at least five games each to the Dodgers, Diamondbacks and Expos, who now are past them in the wild card standings.
If we've learned anything from the interleague period, it's the clear superiority of the National League, which was 109-101 through Sunday night. Those numbers are skewed, and actually made closer, by Oakland's success and the Reds' failure during the interleague period. Excluding the A's, the American League is 87-108 against the National League.
But what we've really learned, if we didn't know it at the start, is that interleague play has got to go. For every entertaining novelty like Lou Piniella's return to Cincinnati as the manager of the Mariners and for every cooked-up subplot in New York's crosstown rivalry between the Yankees and Mets, we're forced to swallow waves of ugly and unattractive pairings that compromise the playoff races and poison the season just when it should be taking center stage.
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