126 Athletes Put On Waivers, Classy Move Ohio U!

I think you've got your percentages out of whack, though maybe not in this particular situation.

I am very much a fan of Title IX, though I have some issues with the interpretation and enforcement of it.

 

As has been said: the law has been in place for 30-plus years.

If schools are still having trouble with "enforcement" -- especially when it causes them to eliminate a team three weeks before its season opener -- that's their own damn fault, not Title IX's.

This is about a school that went $4M over budget and handled it badly, not about the restrictions and/or interpretation of Title IX.

 

Like I said, in this particular case, it definitely seems to be a larger portion of the blame on the administration.

 

Cousin Jeffrey hit the nail on the head. This has been coming long before Kirby jumped into the AD chair. While I didn't agree with it at the time, but OU had to cancel on bringing Va. Tech to Athens and take a game at Illinois to bring in close to .5 mil. Boeh thought it would benefit OU to command 2-for-1 football contracts to bring the ESPNs to Athens and spotlight the university. Unfortunately, they weren't getting much out of two trips down to Blacksburg because they would lose so much in the single game in Athens.
This has been a long time coming, and those cuts were announced weeks ago.

 

I DO NOT WORK AT OU:

With that said, I don't think you appreciate how hard it is for some of the mid-major schools to make the budget work, especially if you have football.

Most schools have had increases in tuition and fees in the neighborhood of 10% per year for the last 5-6 years. If you have a $3 million scholarhsip budget, that means you have to come up with an additional $300,000 just to cover your scholarship bill. Factor that over 5-6 years and schools have almost doubled their costs.

I can't imagine that OU has much of a revenue stream. They don't draw for football, hoops is okay and I can't imagine that they get much from the boosters and alumni and the TV revenue from the league isn't a factor. So where does this money come from?

Dropping sports is tough, but it is happening all around the country.

I checked the OU website and the only sport that they dropped that isn't finishing the year is Lacrosse, and that is because they didn't have enough athletes to field a team. Since the athletes were going to be eligible immediately after they transferred, enough of them decided that it wasn't worth burning a year of eligibility this spring at OU. Here is the release:

Feb. 9, 2007

ATHENS, Ohio - Ohio University Athletics has announced that the Bobcats' 2007 women's lacrosse season will not be played. The decision was reached after a determination that there were an insufficient number of student-athletes to field a team for the upcoming season.

Ohio announced on Jan. 25 that it was discontinuing women's lacrosse, men's swimming and diving, and men's indoor and outdoor track and field at the conclusion of their 2007 seasons.

Several members of the lacrosse team have since expressed their intent to transfer to other institutions to continue their playing careers. A waiver granted by the NCAA allows those student-athletes to retain this year of eligibility if they do not participate in the upcoming spring season.

The Bobcats were scheduled to begin their 16-game regular-season schedule on Feb. 16 at Lehigh.

 

One More Thing. . .

There were several mentions to Jim Lessig and things that took place over two decades ago. Let's take a good look at that:

In the early 80's, the NCAA controlled television for football and only a game or two a week was televised. There was no ESPN contract or wall-to-wall football on Saturday.

At this time, the power conferences in the NCAA decided that they needed more of a share of the TV money (because each conference was guaranteed X number of appearances each year and the big conferences wanted the money that the MAC, WAC, etc was getting). To get their hands on this, they decided to make attendance a factor in determining Division I-A membership.

In the preliminary reports, several conferences, including the MAC, did not fare well and the MAC had to make some hard decisions if they wanted to stay in I-A. They could have easily dropped to I-AA, but nobody wanted to admit that they were second class citizens, so they worked to find a way to meet the attendance criteria. And since a number of the MAC schools at the time (EMU, WMU, OU, Kent, Ball State) had no chance of hitting the 17,000 a year (I think that was the number), creative planning had to be made.

Shortly after the attendance clause was put in place, the big conferences wrestled TV control away from the NCAA, allowing for more and more games to be televised. Once this happened, the bigger conferences really didn't care less who was in I-A, as long as they got all of the TV money (this of course would change when the MAC, WAC, etc. wanted a piece of the BCS 20 years later).

Back to the 80's. . . With TV in its control, the bigger conferences no longer wanted to force teams out of I-A so they added an alternate way to qualify, doing so by averaging 20,000 people for all games (home and away), provided the school have a stadium with at least 30,000 seats. This assured the big schools a continuous stream of home games against the EMU's of the world to pack their non-conference schedule with. Teams like Bowling Green, Central Michigan, etc., would have had to fight to hit the 17,000 figure but opted to play two money games against big schools (Michigan, BYU, Ohio State, Texas), guaranteeing that they'd hit the 20,000 average.

Even though the big schools no longer cared about enforcing the attendance provisions, the smaller ones still had to meet them, leading to creative plans around the country. Some schools took booster club donations and used them to -- on paper -- purchase tickets that were never distributed. It was at this time that the attendance figure became somewhat irrelative because the smaller schools were announcing tickets sold instead of seats in the stadium because at the end of the year, they were going to need the higher "Tickets Sold" figure to stay in I-A.

If you want to jump on guys like Lessig for plans like this, just remember it was either that or I-AA.

 

This has been happening all over the MAc for years.

And as has been said, this is terribly old news.

It'll be the same as it was at BG in 2002, UT later, etc. etc.

These students (and this is coming from a former runner) will throw their crapfits, raise heck for a while, then realize how inconsequential their sports were. Just like at BG, etc.

Sad, but true. The world will go on.

 

Before the cuts, OU had the largest offering of athletics sports of any school in the MAC.

 

And a $4 million deficit. The two go hand-in-hand.

 

Right. So did BG before they cut four sports in 2002.

 

This is a tough time for the players, but they're probably on the good end of the stick, here.

At least now they can focus on what's important in college.

 

Which part is that? Figuring out how you are going to pay back the student loans that you will need to replace the scholarships that just got yanked out from under you?

Blame whoever you want, but the athletes definitely got screwed, especially the ones who had scholarships, but now may not be able to get one even if they transfer.