Here again, the NCAA protects the highest-revenue sport: Women's basketball teams can stock a full roster with scholarship athletes.
But overall, these ratios make little sense. Why must a university offer fewer scholarships to softball players than equestrians? Why can't it give more to soccer players than swimmers? Even worse, by handing down artificially high scholarship limits for sports such as ice hockey and rugby, the NCAA is telling schools they can comply with Title IX by herding athletes onto those teams.
That's not just frustrating to men who don't play football; it's unfair to women competing in more popular sports. And it undermines Title IX by making compliance with the law seem ludicrous.
Opponents of Title IX routinely mock the emergence of women's rowing and sand volleyball programs, as if they're required by federal mandates. But those voices never mention that NCAA rules, not Title IX, forbid colleges from giving more scholarships to cross country runners and softball players.
The truth is, it will never be possible for the NCAA to allot scholarships efficiently with top-down edicts. Over time, some sports will surge in popularity while others will fade, and any bureaucracy as centralized as the NCAA will struggle to keep up.
Plus, one size doesn't fit all. Different schools have different cultures and traditions, so why should the NCAA impose the same model on everyone? Instead, the NCAA could aid both women's and men's sports with one simple move: cast off these sport-specific scholarship limits and let schools decide for themselves how best to allocate their resources. If St. John's, where two men earned national titles in fencing last year, wants to build on that success by offering seven full fencing scholarships instead of fractions adding up to the 4.
If Purdue wants to extend its tradition of excellence in women's golf by providing full rides to 12 women instead of six, tell the Boilermakers to go for it. So if the Oregon administration thinks the school would serve its student-athletes better by giving extra scholarships to runners instead of recruiting more rowers, why not give the Ducks the green light and see what the Aggies do to respond?
This change would instantly make athletic directors more accountable. As things stand now, it's easy for programs to blame absurdities in their priorities on factors beyond their control, including Title IX. But take away the sport-specific limits, and give each school the total number of scholarships about apiece for men and women to hand out as they see fit, and athletic directors would have to justify the choices they make. At the same time, reallocation would let schools compete for the surging number of women who play soccer and volleyball, rather than hunting for phantom hockey and rugby players.
And the overall cost would be approximately nothing -- because, at any school, one scholarship is worth the same amount, no matter who receives it. Of course, some schools might very well pour even more money into football.
But they'd be doing themselves a disservice. Only 69 FBS teams turned a profit last year. Yes, football leads to bigger revenues. It also leads to bigger expenses. So here's another idea: The NCAA could let schools allocate scholarships within certain ranges for each sport. The minimum would guarantee high-quality competition, and the maximum would make sure schools don't turn into single-sport factories.
These limits could be pegged to the standard size of teams, for example, allowing for one to three starting lineups of scholarship players per sport: players for basketball, for baseball and softball, for football, and so forth.
This approach would also give schools much more latitude while protecting other sports from football's grasp. Sure, football coaches would complain; they usually do when the subject turns to scholarship limits.
But the fact is, Alabama used an average of 59 players per game last season on the way to winning the BCS crown, even though the average Division I football team kept players, including walk-ons, in So how does any coach justify that disparity? Finally, there's this: Offering non-revenue sports more scholarships may be the only way to amplify their voices in the ongoing debates over how to reform college athletics.
Last year, an NCAA subcommittee -- the Resource Allocation Working Group -- floated the idea of reducing FBS scholarship limits from 85 to 80, arguing that the move would "allow for athletic talent to be dispersed among more intercollegiate athletics programs.
Even if the NCAA had adopted the measure, it's hard to see how cutting back the scholarships available to one or a few programs would be enough to empower other sports, as opposed to a full-scale redistribution of scholarships. Cartels succeed because they can control supply. Cartels fail because they don't respond well to changes in demand. The NCAA, a classic cartel, says that because Texas and Ohio State make a lot of money on football, Vanderbilt can't offer extra scholarships to baseball players.
And because the NCAA arbitrarily assigned scholarship limits for each sport, in an attempt to make the numbers for women approximately equal to those for men, Vandy can't offer extra scholarships to softball players, either.
If the Commodores could allocate resources according to their own athletic goals, we would see whether Vanderbilt cares enough about baseball and softball to fund the best athletes, or if the school has other priorities. We would also soon find out the same about Vandy's rivals.
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First, the NCAA provides a lot of financial backing. Without NCAA status, players have to use their own money for equipment and transportation source , which is totally unfair, because everyone knows that college students are broke to begin with. More importantly, though, is that NCAA status makes something very official.
In fact, NCAA-approved rugby is currently ladies-only. Gentlemen rugby players don't have NCAA backing… yet. Rugby is the fastest-growing team sport in the USA source. Clubs and high school teams are popping up like mushrooms after a spring rain, and there are over collegiate teams source. Not that it went all that well for the Eagles. All in all, it's a good time for colleges to start jumping on the rugby bandwagon.
It's a fun bandwagon. We don't need to tell you this, but we'll say it anyway. There's a lot of stress involved with being a student-athlete. Being on an NCAA team is like having a really exhausting full-time job, and being a student is also like having a really exhausting full-time job. So if you're doing both…well, you can imagine how tired you're going to be. There's a reason that so many people drop their athletic scholarships by the end of sophomore year: Only the people who really love the game hang on.
If you love rugby more than life itself, then you should be able to stick with it for four years. Anything less than a dramatic, all-consuming love of the game will leave you feeling stretched thin and worn out…like a shape shifter's favorite v-neck.
Another part of the reason why rugby's a popular game—and why it's helping schools with Title IX instead of, say, dog sledding—is because it doesn't cost much to start up a team source. You just give the players a field and a ball and off they go. Okay, it's not quite as simple as that. Rugby is a famously dangerous game, and it's only more dangerous if you don't know what you're doing.
You need to have a good coach, and all the players need to know exactly what's allowed and how to do it. If your coach opens with the line, "So, rugby is basically football without the padding," then run. Run for the hills. Even with proper training, head and neck injuries are super common. So are bruises, scrapes, breaks, lacerations, and—perhaps most fun—ear mutilations source. Because rugby's a rough game, you can't play it for very long.
Any sport can do some real damage to your body if you do it long enough—even low-impact sports like golf or curling.
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