Fire Title IX Until It's Fixed

A recent report by the New York Times found that a number of Division I sports programs skirt Title IX by padding women's teams with phantom players and sometimes guys. That means Title IX isn't working the way it was intended, so it needs to be fired until it can be improved.

The report found many programs kept athletes on rosters even after they quit a team or who never actually played on a team. In other cases teams took advantage of a loophole in Title IX that allows male practice players to be counted as females, the report said.

Title IX has helped women make strides in college sports, but it still hasn't achieved what the law was intended to do, which is create gender equality in athletics. Part of the reason is that equality is very difficult to achieve when so many more men across the board are interested in sports than women.  One of the measures of compliance with Title IX is the proportionality of female athletes to female students on campus. Women now make up 53 percent of Division I schools, but only 46 percent of athletes. Title IX hasn't made more women want to play sports than men, so it ends up punishing men because they have too much interest relative to women. This is a good solution?

Schools don't love Title IX, no matter how PC their rhetoric, because financial realities are incompatible with the regulation. Only two college sports make money (in some cases) at the Divison I level: football and men's basketball. That's it. All other men's sports and all women's sports are drains on the school. So here's what should happen: don't make equality based on roster size or ratios the goal. Make sports about competitiveness. Why keep a team around if it's 0-30 every year just because the law says you have to? No one can lie about wins and losses, and teams that don't average a certain winning percentage over a period of years would be gone for at least a few years before they could be reinstated. Women's sports should not be eliminated outright, but until Title IX is fixed, it should be fired.