<p>Ok, how about some FACTS instead of conjecture?</p>
<p>You don't HAVE to cut teams. You can cut funding.</p>
<p>Football and basketball budgets consume a whopping 72% of the average Division I-A school's total men's athletic operating budget. </p>
<p>If a school cut into that budget instead of cutting a team, they would comply with Title IX.</p>
<p>Most schools DO NOT cut teams.</p>
<p>A recent GAO study found that 72% of schools that added teams from 1992-1993 to 1999-2000 did so without discontinuing any teams.</p>
<p>Basketball and Football should NOT count under title IX because they pay for other sports?</p>
<p>Myth. A 1999 study shows that 58% of Division I-A and I-AA football programs don't generate enough revenue to pay for themselves, much less any other sports. These programs reported annual deficits averaging $1 million and $630,000 respectively. In general, only 48 colleges brought in more money than they spent in 1999, and the annual average deficit at Division I-A colleges that year was $3.3 million.</p>
<p>Where does the money go? Some use chartered jets (instead of commercial planes) to fly their football teams to games, at a cost of hundreds of thousands of dollars. Many house entire football teams in hotels the night before home games (true for virtually all Div. 1-A schools), citing the need to ensure that players get adequate rest, have quiet time to study, have their meals and fluid intake monitored, and are available for pre-game meetings. One university spent $120,000 to repanel the head football coach's office in mahogany while it insisted that there wasn't enough in school coffers to add sports opportunities for women. Another spent over $1 million to buy out the contract of the football coach -- and cut two women's teams to save about $60,000. Still another institution, San Diego State, cut its men's volleyball team to address a $2 million deficit in the athletics program, only to buy state-of-the-art titanium facemasks (and new football uniforms) for the football team four months later, becoming one of only two collegiate programs in the country to have such facemasks.</p>
<p>Women aren't as interested in sports?</p>
<p>MYTH. After Title IX, women's participation in intercollegiate sports skyrocketed. Before Title IX, fewer than 32,000 women participated in college sports; today that number exceeds 150,000--nearly 5 times the pre-Title IX rate, proof that interest follows opportunity.</p>
<p>Title IX oversteps?</p>
<p>MYTH. The playing field is far from level for female athletes, despite Title IX's considerable successes. Women's athletics programs still lag behind men's programs. While 53% of the students at Division I schools are women, female athletes in Division I receive only: 41% of the opportunities to play intercollegiate sports, 43% of the total athletic scholarship dollars, 36% of the athletic operating budgets, and 32% of the dollars spent to recruit new athletes.</p>
<p>MEANWHILE spending on men's sports continues to increase and dominate spending on women's sports:</p>
<p>In Division I, in 2000, for every dollar being spent on women's sports, almost two dollars are being spent on men's sports.</p>
<p>Of the $3.57 million average increase in expenditures for men's Division I-A sports programs from 1996-2000, 68% of this increase, or $2,463,000, went to football. This amount exceeds the entire operating budget for all women's sports in 2000 by over $1,693,600.</p>
<p>Title IX has done all it needed to do.</p>
<p>False. For every new dollar spent on athletics at the Division I and II levels, male sports receive 65 cents while female sports receive 35 cents.</p>
<p>And each year male athletes receive $137 million more than female athletes in college athletic scholarships at NCAA member institutions.</p>