Opening Statement

Andrew Zimbalist
Smith College

The financial problem with college sports today is not Title IX or its implementation guidelines. The problem is endemic waste.

DIA football does not need 85 scholarships. NFL teams have 53-man rosters. The average Division IA team has 32 walk-ons plus 85 scholarship players. If football scholarships were cut to 60, the average college would save approximately $750,000 annually, enough to finance more than two wrestling teams.

The NCAA should also seek a congressional antitrust exemption with regard to coaches' salaries. Currently, there are dozens of Division I men's basketball coaches who make $1 million or more, and there are dozens more football coaches in this category. Knock them down to $200,000 and colleges would be able to add another three to six sports. Today's stratospheric coaches' salaries are not justified economically: how can it be, for instance, that the top-paid coaches in college football and men's basketball get comparable compensation packages to each other when the average DIA football team has revenues fully three times as high as the average DIA basketball team. And, how can it be that the top dozen or two DIA football coaches get paid salaries similar to the NFL coaches, when the average NFL team has revenues more than ten times as high as the average DIA football team.

Other savings are available to athletic programs. Colleges going to bowl games might also consider reducing the size of their traveling entourages, eliminating the practice of putting the men's basketball and football teams up at a local hotel before home games, diminishing the size of coaching staffs, cutting the length of the playing season in many sports, among other reforms.

Let me conclude with a final comment about DIA football. One often hears that gender equity is fine, but football should be taken out of the equation. That is, remove football's 85 scholarships and its operating budget before judging parity between men's and women's sports. There is no justification for such a policy. One might as well argue that women's crew should be taken out before the gender participation numbers are compared. Title IX does not state that there shall be no gender discrimination where revenue generation is equal. It simply states that there shall be no gender discrimination.

Article I of the NCAA Constitution states that college sports are based on the principle of amateurism. As such, Division I and II schools benefit mightily from not directly paying their athletes, from tax exemptions on facility bonds and from special tax treatment of UBIT income. As long as football benefits from the umbrellas of amateurism and the academy, the only rational course is to treat it the same as all sports programs for Title IX purposes.