As the Title IX blog points out (again), John McCain still doesn't understand the Title IX law.

McCain: I am concerned, however, that the Clinton administration took unwise liberties in interpreting Title IX with the consequence that many schools have adopted policies of strictly equal funding for male and female athletic programs. Unfortunately, many popular athletic programs have been cut because the overall amount of funding available for athletics programs will not sustain identical men's and women's programs in every sport.

T-9: Because I have made this complaint before, I will keep it brief, in the hopes that someone from the McCain campaign will absorb it and pass the info on to their boss.

Title IX does not call for identical programs in every sport. This rhetoric clearly belies your intent to exempt football from the Title IX equation. Don't think we don't see this. And second, I have yet to see (though would be happy to) an athletic department that is equally funding its men's and women's programs.

Which brings me to some random thoughts about the economy, athletics, and Title IX as applied to sports (because we all know, of course, that Title IX has not been just about sports -- it's had a huge, positive impact on the number of women attending college).

1) "It's Affordable!" should be in every women's basketball promo.

2) This is a great (though I use that word advisedly. Perhaps "useful" would be better) time to check in with the Sports Economist Blog (where I, as a transplanted Red Sox fan, am tracking with interest the investigation into the funding of the new Yankee stadium.)

3) It's been hard to avoid articles (or interviews - Hi Stacy Dales on the football sidelines!) on the impact of the economy on colleges/universities and their (football) athletic programs. Recently the NYTimes had three:

Financial Straits of Boosters Hit Athletic Programs

Oklahoma State is hardly alone in watching its soaring ambitions crash back to earth with the fortunes of some of its biggest benefactors.

When Aubrey K. McClendon, the chief executive of Chesapeake Energy, recently announced that he had to sell some 32 million shares, or more than 5 percent of the company he founded, worth nearly $600 million, athletic officials at the University of Oklahoma were rattled. The bankruptcy proceedings of another energy company, SemGroup, has brought unwanted attention to the University of Kansas, where the company’s ousted co-founder, Tom Kivisto, had pledged $12 million for a recently opened football complex.

Like the chief executives on Wall Street, leaders of collegiate athletic programs must acknowledge that the boom days of fund-raising have given way to belt-tightening.

Rising Criticism as Rutgers Invests in Athletics

Fair or not, Persaud and several other students said that they could not help but link their own hardships to news that the state university planned to move ahead with $102 million in football stadium renovations or that the athletic department received more than $2 million in state earmarks when overall financing to Rutgers was being cut.

“I think it’s ridiculous, because there are so many more things they could be spending their money on, like technology in the classroom,” said Persaud, a junior majoring in biology and psychology. “Or more buses.”

Lure of Big-Time Sports Propels Rutgers

But the president of Rutgers, Richard L. McCormick, while acknowledging that the university needs to reshape its oversight and ethics policies and that it faces a severe cash crunch that is likely to scale back the stadium project, says that turning back from big-time sports is not an option. He says that the $50 million sports budget is less than 3 percent of the university’s $1.75 billion budget. The university provides $15 million of the athletic budget, with the rest coming from ticket sales and other sources.

Dr. McCormick then reels off a list of the big-time public universities with big-time sports: Michigan, Virginia, North Carolina, Berkeley and the rest. For better or worse, that’s the way the game is played at America’s public universities.
In the immediate future, Rutgers is facing rising financing costs, a severe budget crunch and a depressed economy that has all but shut down the donations that were expected to help pay for the project. And the questions raised by The Star-Ledger of Newark about the financial management of Rutgers athletics have hurt the university’s credibility with the Legislature at a time when it most needs it.

As athletic directors begin the process of belt tightening, it will be interest to see which programs get strangled. (Check out NBR's 2007 video series on the business of college football -- remembering that many endowments are in the market).

You've got to wonder if non-football (male) sports are cut, if fingers will be pointed at Title IX.