Big East Catholic Schools Ponder Leaving En Masse

True. That garbage has done more to wreck college sports than it has to help it at most schools. This "Well, we have to start a women's crew or cheerleading team just to balance some numbers" nonsense.

 

You know, All In The Family is not a how-to video.

 

Huh?

If women's collegiate sports were such a profitable enterprise, why aren't the glut of TV networks out there fighting over rights for volleyball, women's basketball, softball, etc.?

You can make the case of having women's sports as part of the "educational" experience. But, at the vast majority of schools, they do not even make enough money to be self-supporting. Yet they want to be treated as equals with football and basketball?

At one school where I worked, we started a women's golf team from scratch. Among other recruiting tools, flyers were posted across campus encouraging students to try out. On the flyer was this disclaimer "No golf experience necessary". Hello?!?! I'm all for universities teaching, including coaches. But you are going to give NCAA Division I athletic scholarships to someone who has no experience playing the sport?!?!?! Not high school, not club level, nothing? All for the sake of filling out a roster to justify some numbers game?

As you might expect, the scores posted in competition were rather, um, ridiculous.

Anyway, you get my point. We now return to our regularly scheduled discussion about the Pope's amateur basketball league.

 

Title 9 is garbage? Bullshit.

 

The easiest way for colleges to comply with the LAW (and an enormously popular one at that) that is Title IX is to drop football.

 

< Rubs hands feverishly over face >

Just because something isn't "profitable" doesn't mean it's "garbage."

Integrating schools in the United States wasn't "profitable." And yet, I hope you wouldn't think segregation was the way to go.

 

I'm as big a supporter of Title IX as the next guy but that statement is utter fucking horseshit.

But its horseshit the Women's Sports Foundation has been shoveling for close to 20 years so it's accepted as fact by people who aren't paying attention or are too lazy to educate themselves.

 

In another life, I was an SID at a mid-major non-football school in a big metro area. We were not the big state school. We were an ugly stepchild. Our men's basketball team would draw a couple of thousand, except when we played our in-state rival. Women's basketball crowds would be less than 1,000 most nights.

If that school were to drop athletics, nobody would really care. A hundred or so student-athletes would be without a place to play and a couple of dozen people would be out of jobs. But it wouldn't have any affect at all on the city. And I've heard talk that the school is thinking about adding football, which be an absolutely horrible, horrible move and a huge financial drain.

 

Sounds like something will happen by this weekend. The CAA is preparing to lose two and add two.

 

Which schools?

 

It's starting already ... Hawaii in the MWC for football, all the others in the Big West. BYU indie in football, WCC everything else. Notre Dame staying indie in football, but otherwise, eventually, it'll be an ACC school. Of course, there's also Boise State and San Diego State in the Big East for football only, but let's not get started.

Cross-conference combos in smaller sports should also be considered. When I was in college in the 80s, the NorCal and SoCal schools in the then-WCAC and PCAA, plus Nevada, had separate baseball leagues.

 

or come up with a womens sport that requires 75 players.

How many roster spots to roller derby teams usually have?