The thing about Title IX in sports is that the basic problem is football.
The general requirement of Title IX is that sports should be separate but equal (obviously, I'm quoting Plessy v Ferguson maliciously here). That generally means that the number of scholarships given to male student-athletes and the number given to female student-athletes should be the same.
If it weren't for football, this would be easy - for instance, each (top-level) college can have 13 basketball scholarships per team, so that's 13 men and 13 women. Compliance with Title IX is absolutely trivial. Even with baseball, they just have 12 men playing baseball and 12 women playing softball.
But football is 85 scholarships and they are all men. This creates a problem where a college has to have 85 additional scholarships that are all women. But all (or virtually all) the other sports are played by both sexes. So they end up with every other sport having more scholarships for women than for men, and men's sports getting dropped, so that the women's version of that sport can be used to balance out the many men's scholarships in football. So many colleges now have women-only track and field, for instance.
It really would have been a far simpler solution to just require any college that has a men's football team to create a women's football team with equal numbers of scholarships. Most of the other distortions would drop out of the system if the requirement was equal numbers on a sport-by-sport basis, rather than a college-by-college basis with the single largest sport being the only major single-sex sport.
If I had to guess, (no actual facts to back this up, just personal observations,) probably because there's no demand for them. How many girls did you know, back when you were in middle school and high school, who showed *any interest at all* in playing football?
Soccer, basketball, baseball, tennis, etc., sure. But for some reason, football seems to be rather uniquely "not a girls' sport."
There are a fair number of girls who are interested in playing football. I think even more than boys, though I'm not sure about that. But, you know, the *other* football, the one that actually involves a lot of contact between foot and ball. So we could imagine a school where the men's poncified rugby, er, "football", team is counterbalanced by the women's actual football team.
Except that, as Ryan notes, the fancy rugby teams give out a *lot* more scholarships.
I think John's impish suggestion was that you could fulfill the *letter* of the rule that says "there has to be a men's football team and a women's football team, only the one can balance out the other" by playing on the double meaning.
An exceedingly good question to which I don't think I have a complete answer.
I think that part of the answer is just that football is a very violent sport and colleges in the 1970s when Title IX was new did not regard creating a women's football team as a reasonable thing to do.
Another part is that there aren't high school women's football teams (Title IX doesn't apply to high school sport because there's no scholarships involved), which means that there isn't an adequate pool of players to recruit. It is dangerous to play football without a significant amount of time spent being coached and practising: if you hit people the wrong way you will hurt them. This will get penalised, but you have to practise until you have muscle memory of the right way to do it or you'll still mess it up at game speed with pressure on. Colleges can rely on high schools to have done this for boys, but not for girls.
There's no pool of players to recruit from, no professional ranks to graduate to, no Olympics to aspire to (which is what keeps sports like swimming and gymnastics going), and the sport is intrinsically more dangerous than others.
But that's more about why they don't do it now. Most of that was equally true for women's basketball or women's soccer in the 1970s. But that didn't stop colleges making women's teams in those sports, and high school and professional sport mostly built themselves up on the back of the college game.
Another thing to consider is that 85 scholarships is a lot. In football its necessary because even though each time only has 11 players on the field at any given time, positions are highly specialized. It's rare these days for anyone to play offense and defense, so 11 becomes 22. Then you have guys that are only on special teams (at minimum a kicker and punter, but increasingly a second kicker and a long snapper, and occasionally guys that specialize in kick/punt returns). So now you're around 25. Given injuries and the roster turnover that's inherent in college sports, you want to be 2-3 deep at every position at a bare minimum. So now you're in the 50-75 range. Then you have to factor in specialized packages. For example, a standard defensive formation will have 4 defensive backs, but you also need nickel (5 DBs) and dime (6 DBs) packages in certain situations. Or, on offense, 1 tight end might be standard but 2 TEs has become really common. In practice, managing those 85 scholarships is difficult.
Finally, consider that almost every school wants a football team because they are the biggest revenue generators and, in nearly all cases, pay for nearly every other sport (basketball is usually self-sustaining, but it's a rare exception to find any other sport that doesn't need to be subsidized). So multiply 85 by about 120 DI football teams, plus about 160 D2 teams (though they get fewer scholarships).
So everything you said above is true, but if you want to overcome all those physical and cultural hurdles and build up women's football from scratch, you have to create a much bigger pool of potential players than you would if you just needed ~12 scholarship players to field a team in a sport with a smaller roster. Plus, in that case, you have more flexibility in which sports you use to equalize the number of scholarships. For example, some schools have varsity women's ice hockey because the local culture makes sense, but other schools can do something different.
The natural comparison would be with the NFL, which - at first glance - has a roster limit of only 53. But that's not a proper comparison; plenty of players on a NCAA D1 FBS scholarship would be "inactive" in pro sports (injured players, redshirts, etc). The fairer comparison is to the number of players an NFL team is allowed to have under contract, which is 90. College teams don't have more football players than NFL teams, in spite of what some talking heads will say.
So yeah, building 100 full rosters would mean finding 8500 players, which realistically means 100,000 playing in high school. Basketball only needs 12 per team, much easier for a high school to put together.
If you look post-college, the only professional women's football was the LFL (originally "Lingerie Football League") which, uh, wasn't really selling itself on the quality of the sporting competition. There is a tiny bit of amateur 11 v 11 tackle football (well, unpaid: WFA teams are allowed to pay their players but none of them can actually afford to do so), and they just scrape enough money together to pay a game fee and flight and accomodation for the players who play for the USA in the IFAF World Championships, so that is technically the only professional 11 v 11 women's tackle football team in the world (for the three games they play every four years). Unsurprisingly, women's American football is even less important in every other country and the USA has won ever game they've ever played (they are 12-0 all-time).
There are 85 scholarship players on D1 football teams, but don't forget about walk-ons. Google tells me about 40 non-scholarship players is the norm. That doesn't contradict anything either of us has said; I'm just adding it for completeness. It makes sense to me that college would need a bigger roster given the 3-5ish year duration of a college career.
Man, I totally forgot about the LFL. Good times.
I knew nothing about amateur women's tackle football before reading this post. That's interesting. USA! USA!
I happened to be in Finland in 2013 when the women's world championship was on and saw a billboard at the airport. Honestly, I had to look it up in wikipedia to get any details, but it's a lot easier to find something if you're sure that it exists.
LFL was a casualty of the pandemic, apparently. They're now the "X-League", are wearing uniforms that cover slightly more of their bodies (cycle shorts and midriff-baring tops) and are supposedly coming back in 2025. I can't work out if they are owned by the XFL or not, which probably is intentional.
>Finally, consider that almost every school wants a football team because they are the biggest revenue generators and, in nearly all cases, pay for nearly every other sport
I'm reminded of something I read a while back, possibly from one of Milton Friedman's books, about colleges being in multiple businesses at once, producing education and certification for students, monuments for major donors, and football for alumni.
…I think the obvious thing to do here is to ban American football for boys as well. Just, like, in general. There. Balance restored, and fewer American young men will sustain grievous bodily injuries. Is there a downside?
Other than preventing consenting adults from engaging in an activity they want to do?
Well, you're also preventing some people from making life-changing amounts of money. Granted, it's a very small number of people who earn that much, so in the aggregate the impact may be small. But for the individuals who do benefit...
I'm an individualist with libertarian philosophical leanings, so these things matter to me.
Oh, yes, of course. The post was meant to be tongue-in-cheek. I find the mindset of people who willingly subject themselves to American football baffling, but I wouldn't seriously propose banning it. It's just momentarily funny to fantasize for a few seconds about, just this once, allowing ourselves to tell the insane people who would like to keep hitting themselves with hammers ".......you know what, screw this, I'm going to be a traitor to my principles and take your hammers away". Just a bit of "yes, yes, principles, but between ourselves those jocks' preferences *are* completely bonkers, right?" elbowing between geeks, do forgive me.
Though I do, more seriously, think that there should be awareness campaigns of how physically dangerous it can be, as there is for other hazardous activities we don't want to outright ban, like smoking. If girls have successfully come to the rational position that it is a bad use of their time, without anyone needing to actually ban them from it -- then surely, even accounting for testosterone and objective greater physical resilience, boys could with the right cultural shift come to the same conclusion. I wonder.
I've lost the reference, but some flag football is taking off with women.
I'd much rather watch healthy young women play -- even if it's flag. Commentators could go on about their personal stories and make a great show of it if they had a pro women's flag football league. It would be more interesting than soccer.
Why would professional womwn's flag football be more interesting than (professional women's?) soccer? I don't consider women's soccer particularly interesting but have no idea about flag football. In male sports, I consider soccer much more interesting than american football.
Soccer is a bunch of people standing around. American football is a master class in ambition -- at least for American men. And it's a meritocracy. It takes strategy, physical agility, and brute strength. Flag football emphasizes agility and strategy over strength, which seems like a natural fit for women. And women are just better looking than men. I wouldn't mind watching them run and dodge and block, and revel in it all.
Of course I don't share your view on soccer but I guess if both of us did a deep dive into the other's favored sport, we'd learn to appreciate it.
Right now, I see american football as an anaerobic competition. Short encounters, less than a round of boxing, of high mental and physical intensity. Association footballs seems to me much more challenging endurance-wise. Some of the guys stand around but every one except the goalies runs quite a few miles per match with a lot of intermediate sprints. There's high sophistication about where to stand around and how long, where to run when and how to handle the ball and the opponent.
Yes. If you want the sophisticated intellectual version, you can read Jonathan Wilson's columns in the Guardian. If you want the shouty talk radio version, then there's 606, which is available as a podcast.
Yep, and this leads to some really weird recruiting behavior. I went to a US university decidedly not known for it's football prowess. Despite that, we had a girls bowling team with members on full scholarship from all over the country. The girls tennis team was almost entirely Dutch women who were recruited specifically to play tennis at a school nobody has heard of.
You've caused me to look up something that puzzled me the other day, while grocery shopping. What seemed to be a delegation from Europe in matching tennis outfits, but which on closer inspection were those of a second-tier state college a couple hundred miles away.
I didn't think anymore about it, but just now looked up the rosters: mostly France, England, Ukraine, Luxembourg, Australia - just one American.
Well and you are assuming there is similar interest in playing sports among men and women, which I would love to introduce you to humans if that is your belief.
Fair. It's really title IX makes that assumption, but it would be a minor annoyance if there were women's football teams: if they existed, EEOC and courts would probably have eventually (at some point in the 1990s, probably) interpreted title IX to require colleges to have both men's and women's teams with equal numbers of scholarships in every sport that they have scholarships in. But that would mean a court requiring the creation of 10,000 women's football scholarships. There aren't 10,000 high school girls who know how to put pads on, and Title IX doesn't apply to high schools, so they'd never be able to get them to start building girls' football teams to supply players to the colleges.
The distortion of having a women's team matching every men's team would be real, but wouldn't be that big - sure, fewer women are interested in playing sports than men, but not by that much given the very small number of scholarships available. There are about 15 million students total; there are around half a million "student-athletes", though a majority of those are in the non-scholarship Division III. Division I scholarships are maybe half a percent of students. Guessing that perhaps half of men and a fourth of women are interested in playing sports, that means that they're the top 1% of men and the top 2% of women: that's more than a high enough standard for the sports to be interesting and competitive. Sure, the women's version will be a bit worse relative to what women are capable of, and the TV and in-person audience will be lower - but it's not catastrophic for the structure of college sports.
The distortions caused by men's football result in eight sports (Div I) being women-only (beach volleyball, bowling, equestrian, field hockey, rugby, triathlon, plus the two sports that cheerleading was split into: "acrobatics and tumbling" and "stunt") - note that five of these are Olympic sports, so US Olympic teams have men who never got scholarships competing alongside women who did [aside: women's rowing is governed by the NCAA, men's never joined and is governed by a separate body, the IRA, so it's not a "women-only sport" in spite of NCAA regulations apparently saying it is]. On top of that, the only sport with equal numbers of scholarships for men and women is ice hockey, though wrestling (9.9 men, 10.0 women) and baseball/softball (11.7 men, 12.0 women) are very close, and lacrosse has, uniquely, more men (12.6 to 12.0). But many other sports have vast gaps like 8-4.5 in tennis or 12-4.5 in indoor volleyball.
The combination of Title IX and men's college football (or the absence of women's college football) screws over almost every other men's sport. Even basketball is 13 men and 15 women. Why? To soak up 2 of the men's football scholarships in Title IX compliance.
Meh I think the differences in playing sports competitive are quite a bit large enough that there is some serious injustice in "equal" scholarship numbers. My college had a multiple national championship winning wrestling team disbanded to string together some barely functional girls volleyball/softball/swimming teams. All sports where the number of boys interested in scholarships and not getting them almost certainly exceed the number of women wanting scholarships.
You can start noticing the difference between boys and girls and their commitment to sports in soccer as early as like 8U. Stick 40 boys and 40 girls on a field and after a year 20 of the girls are checked out and 10 of the boys, and after two years maybe 25/12.
I would argue that title 9 has taken a situation where there were at say a normal 10,000 person mid-sized state school roughly 2,500/5,000 men interested in playing college sports and say 400 on scholarship and 500/5,000 women interested in playing college sports and 100/5,000 on scholarship.
And made the figures 250/5,000 and 250/500 and called that "progress", under the mistaken belief that the reason boys are 10X more interested in sports has something to do with "oppression" and "opportunity" instead of you know natural human behavior.
IDK I coach youth sports at a very fair handed coed even-minded level. And especially once you hit 10-11 you bleed girls like crazy. There are still plenty of girls interested in sports, but nothing like the boys. Go look at recess at any elementary school in the world. Like half the boys will be playing soccer/tag/whatever EVERY DAY. Meanwhile half the girls are sitting around talking.
The thing about Title IX in sports is that the basic problem is football.
The general requirement of Title IX is that sports should be separate but equal (obviously, I'm quoting Plessy v Ferguson maliciously here). That generally means that the number of scholarships given to male student-athletes and the number given to female student-athletes should be the same.
If it weren't for football, this would be easy - for instance, each (top-level) college can have 13 basketball scholarships per team, so that's 13 men and 13 women. Compliance with Title IX is absolutely trivial. Even with baseball, they just have 12 men playing baseball and 12 women playing softball.
But football is 85 scholarships and they are all men. This creates a problem where a college has to have 85 additional scholarships that are all women. But all (or virtually all) the other sports are played by both sexes. So they end up with every other sport having more scholarships for women than for men, and men's sports getting dropped, so that the women's version of that sport can be used to balance out the many men's scholarships in football. So many colleges now have women-only track and field, for instance.
It really would have been a far simpler solution to just require any college that has a men's football team to create a women's football team with equal numbers of scholarships. Most of the other distortions would drop out of the system if the requirement was equal numbers on a sport-by-sport basis, rather than a college-by-college basis with the single largest sport being the only major single-sex sport.
Why don't colleges create women's football teams?
If I had to guess, (no actual facts to back this up, just personal observations,) probably because there's no demand for them. How many girls did you know, back when you were in middle school and high school, who showed *any interest at all* in playing football?
Soccer, basketball, baseball, tennis, etc., sure. But for some reason, football seems to be rather uniquely "not a girls' sport."
There are a fair number of girls who are interested in playing football. I think even more than boys, though I'm not sure about that. But, you know, the *other* football, the one that actually involves a lot of contact between foot and ball. So we could imagine a school where the men's poncified rugby, er, "football", team is counterbalanced by the women's actual football team.
Except that, as Ryan notes, the fancy rugby teams give out a *lot* more scholarships.
🙄
You know exactly what we're talking about. Here, have a pedant pendant: 📿.
I think John's impish suggestion was that you could fulfill the *letter* of the rule that says "there has to be a men's football team and a women's football team, only the one can balance out the other" by playing on the double meaning.
Or in less ambiguous terms, a men's handegg team and women's soccer team.
It doesn’t work because men and women both play football..er…soccer. You would have to cancel soccer scholarships for men. Right?
Right. Would anybody notice if we cancelled soccer scholarships for men?
Someone might…
An exceedingly good question to which I don't think I have a complete answer.
I think that part of the answer is just that football is a very violent sport and colleges in the 1970s when Title IX was new did not regard creating a women's football team as a reasonable thing to do.
Another part is that there aren't high school women's football teams (Title IX doesn't apply to high school sport because there's no scholarships involved), which means that there isn't an adequate pool of players to recruit. It is dangerous to play football without a significant amount of time spent being coached and practising: if you hit people the wrong way you will hurt them. This will get penalised, but you have to practise until you have muscle memory of the right way to do it or you'll still mess it up at game speed with pressure on. Colleges can rely on high schools to have done this for boys, but not for girls.
There's no pool of players to recruit from, no professional ranks to graduate to, no Olympics to aspire to (which is what keeps sports like swimming and gymnastics going), and the sport is intrinsically more dangerous than others.
But that's more about why they don't do it now. Most of that was equally true for women's basketball or women's soccer in the 1970s. But that didn't stop colleges making women's teams in those sports, and high school and professional sport mostly built themselves up on the back of the college game.
Another thing to consider is that 85 scholarships is a lot. In football its necessary because even though each time only has 11 players on the field at any given time, positions are highly specialized. It's rare these days for anyone to play offense and defense, so 11 becomes 22. Then you have guys that are only on special teams (at minimum a kicker and punter, but increasingly a second kicker and a long snapper, and occasionally guys that specialize in kick/punt returns). So now you're around 25. Given injuries and the roster turnover that's inherent in college sports, you want to be 2-3 deep at every position at a bare minimum. So now you're in the 50-75 range. Then you have to factor in specialized packages. For example, a standard defensive formation will have 4 defensive backs, but you also need nickel (5 DBs) and dime (6 DBs) packages in certain situations. Or, on offense, 1 tight end might be standard but 2 TEs has become really common. In practice, managing those 85 scholarships is difficult.
Finally, consider that almost every school wants a football team because they are the biggest revenue generators and, in nearly all cases, pay for nearly every other sport (basketball is usually self-sustaining, but it's a rare exception to find any other sport that doesn't need to be subsidized). So multiply 85 by about 120 DI football teams, plus about 160 D2 teams (though they get fewer scholarships).
So everything you said above is true, but if you want to overcome all those physical and cultural hurdles and build up women's football from scratch, you have to create a much bigger pool of potential players than you would if you just needed ~12 scholarship players to field a team in a sport with a smaller roster. Plus, in that case, you have more flexibility in which sports you use to equalize the number of scholarships. For example, some schools have varsity women's ice hockey because the local culture makes sense, but other schools can do something different.
The natural comparison would be with the NFL, which - at first glance - has a roster limit of only 53. But that's not a proper comparison; plenty of players on a NCAA D1 FBS scholarship would be "inactive" in pro sports (injured players, redshirts, etc). The fairer comparison is to the number of players an NFL team is allowed to have under contract, which is 90. College teams don't have more football players than NFL teams, in spite of what some talking heads will say.
So yeah, building 100 full rosters would mean finding 8500 players, which realistically means 100,000 playing in high school. Basketball only needs 12 per team, much easier for a high school to put together.
If you look post-college, the only professional women's football was the LFL (originally "Lingerie Football League") which, uh, wasn't really selling itself on the quality of the sporting competition. There is a tiny bit of amateur 11 v 11 tackle football (well, unpaid: WFA teams are allowed to pay their players but none of them can actually afford to do so), and they just scrape enough money together to pay a game fee and flight and accomodation for the players who play for the USA in the IFAF World Championships, so that is technically the only professional 11 v 11 women's tackle football team in the world (for the three games they play every four years). Unsurprisingly, women's American football is even less important in every other country and the USA has won ever game they've ever played (they are 12-0 all-time).
There are 85 scholarship players on D1 football teams, but don't forget about walk-ons. Google tells me about 40 non-scholarship players is the norm. That doesn't contradict anything either of us has said; I'm just adding it for completeness. It makes sense to me that college would need a bigger roster given the 3-5ish year duration of a college career.
Man, I totally forgot about the LFL. Good times.
I knew nothing about amateur women's tackle football before reading this post. That's interesting. USA! USA!
I happened to be in Finland in 2013 when the women's world championship was on and saw a billboard at the airport. Honestly, I had to look it up in wikipedia to get any details, but it's a lot easier to find something if you're sure that it exists.
LFL was a casualty of the pandemic, apparently. They're now the "X-League", are wearing uniforms that cover slightly more of their bodies (cycle shorts and midriff-baring tops) and are supposedly coming back in 2025. I can't work out if they are owned by the XFL or not, which probably is intentional.
>Finally, consider that almost every school wants a football team because they are the biggest revenue generators and, in nearly all cases, pay for nearly every other sport
I'm reminded of something I read a while back, possibly from one of Milton Friedman's books, about colleges being in multiple businesses at once, producing education and certification for students, monuments for major donors, and football for alumni.
…I think the obvious thing to do here is to ban American football for boys as well. Just, like, in general. There. Balance restored, and fewer American young men will sustain grievous bodily injuries. Is there a downside?
I like the cut of your jib!
I agree, but about half the country would burn both of us at the stake as heretics.
Tempting, I have to say.
"Is there a downside?"
Other than preventing consenting adults from engaging in an activity they want to do?
Well, you're also preventing some people from making life-changing amounts of money. Granted, it's a very small number of people who earn that much, so in the aggregate the impact may be small. But for the individuals who do benefit...
I'm an individualist with libertarian philosophical leanings, so these things matter to me.
Oh, yes, of course. The post was meant to be tongue-in-cheek. I find the mindset of people who willingly subject themselves to American football baffling, but I wouldn't seriously propose banning it. It's just momentarily funny to fantasize for a few seconds about, just this once, allowing ourselves to tell the insane people who would like to keep hitting themselves with hammers ".......you know what, screw this, I'm going to be a traitor to my principles and take your hammers away". Just a bit of "yes, yes, principles, but between ourselves those jocks' preferences *are* completely bonkers, right?" elbowing between geeks, do forgive me.
Though I do, more seriously, think that there should be awareness campaigns of how physically dangerous it can be, as there is for other hazardous activities we don't want to outright ban, like smoking. If girls have successfully come to the rational position that it is a bad use of their time, without anyone needing to actually ban them from it -- then surely, even accounting for testosterone and objective greater physical resilience, boys could with the right cultural shift come to the same conclusion. I wonder.
I've lost the reference, but some flag football is taking off with women.
I'd much rather watch healthy young women play -- even if it's flag. Commentators could go on about their personal stories and make a great show of it if they had a pro women's flag football league. It would be more interesting than soccer.
Why would professional womwn's flag football be more interesting than (professional women's?) soccer? I don't consider women's soccer particularly interesting but have no idea about flag football. In male sports, I consider soccer much more interesting than american football.
Soccer is a bunch of people standing around. American football is a master class in ambition -- at least for American men. And it's a meritocracy. It takes strategy, physical agility, and brute strength. Flag football emphasizes agility and strategy over strength, which seems like a natural fit for women. And women are just better looking than men. I wouldn't mind watching them run and dodge and block, and revel in it all.
Of course I don't share your view on soccer but I guess if both of us did a deep dive into the other's favored sport, we'd learn to appreciate it.
Right now, I see american football as an anaerobic competition. Short encounters, less than a round of boxing, of high mental and physical intensity. Association footballs seems to me much more challenging endurance-wise. Some of the guys stand around but every one except the goalies runs quite a few miles per match with a lot of intermediate sprints. There's high sophistication about where to stand around and how long, where to run when and how to handle the ball and the opponent.
Does soccer inspire the same amount of talk radio talk and minute internet rehashing? I honestly don't know. Or is the appeal more in the moment?
Yes. If you want the sophisticated intellectual version, you can read Jonathan Wilson's columns in the Guardian. If you want the shouty talk radio version, then there's 606, which is available as a podcast.
Yep, and this leads to some really weird recruiting behavior. I went to a US university decidedly not known for it's football prowess. Despite that, we had a girls bowling team with members on full scholarship from all over the country. The girls tennis team was almost entirely Dutch women who were recruited specifically to play tennis at a school nobody has heard of.
You've caused me to look up something that puzzled me the other day, while grocery shopping. What seemed to be a delegation from Europe in matching tennis outfits, but which on closer inspection were those of a second-tier state college a couple hundred miles away.
I didn't think anymore about it, but just now looked up the rosters: mostly France, England, Ukraine, Luxembourg, Australia - just one American.
Yeah a second-tier state school campus I went to in the early 00s had a couple different girl's teams who recruited most of their players in Europe.
Well and you are assuming there is similar interest in playing sports among men and women, which I would love to introduce you to humans if that is your belief.
Fair. It's really title IX makes that assumption, but it would be a minor annoyance if there were women's football teams: if they existed, EEOC and courts would probably have eventually (at some point in the 1990s, probably) interpreted title IX to require colleges to have both men's and women's teams with equal numbers of scholarships in every sport that they have scholarships in. But that would mean a court requiring the creation of 10,000 women's football scholarships. There aren't 10,000 high school girls who know how to put pads on, and Title IX doesn't apply to high schools, so they'd never be able to get them to start building girls' football teams to supply players to the colleges.
The distortion of having a women's team matching every men's team would be real, but wouldn't be that big - sure, fewer women are interested in playing sports than men, but not by that much given the very small number of scholarships available. There are about 15 million students total; there are around half a million "student-athletes", though a majority of those are in the non-scholarship Division III. Division I scholarships are maybe half a percent of students. Guessing that perhaps half of men and a fourth of women are interested in playing sports, that means that they're the top 1% of men and the top 2% of women: that's more than a high enough standard for the sports to be interesting and competitive. Sure, the women's version will be a bit worse relative to what women are capable of, and the TV and in-person audience will be lower - but it's not catastrophic for the structure of college sports.
The distortions caused by men's football result in eight sports (Div I) being women-only (beach volleyball, bowling, equestrian, field hockey, rugby, triathlon, plus the two sports that cheerleading was split into: "acrobatics and tumbling" and "stunt") - note that five of these are Olympic sports, so US Olympic teams have men who never got scholarships competing alongside women who did [aside: women's rowing is governed by the NCAA, men's never joined and is governed by a separate body, the IRA, so it's not a "women-only sport" in spite of NCAA regulations apparently saying it is]. On top of that, the only sport with equal numbers of scholarships for men and women is ice hockey, though wrestling (9.9 men, 10.0 women) and baseball/softball (11.7 men, 12.0 women) are very close, and lacrosse has, uniquely, more men (12.6 to 12.0). But many other sports have vast gaps like 8-4.5 in tennis or 12-4.5 in indoor volleyball.
The combination of Title IX and men's college football (or the absence of women's college football) screws over almost every other men's sport. Even basketball is 13 men and 15 women. Why? To soak up 2 of the men's football scholarships in Title IX compliance.
Meh I think the differences in playing sports competitive are quite a bit large enough that there is some serious injustice in "equal" scholarship numbers. My college had a multiple national championship winning wrestling team disbanded to string together some barely functional girls volleyball/softball/swimming teams. All sports where the number of boys interested in scholarships and not getting them almost certainly exceed the number of women wanting scholarships.
You can start noticing the difference between boys and girls and their commitment to sports in soccer as early as like 8U. Stick 40 boys and 40 girls on a field and after a year 20 of the girls are checked out and 10 of the boys, and after two years maybe 25/12.
I would argue that title 9 has taken a situation where there were at say a normal 10,000 person mid-sized state school roughly 2,500/5,000 men interested in playing college sports and say 400 on scholarship and 500/5,000 women interested in playing college sports and 100/5,000 on scholarship.
And made the figures 250/5,000 and 250/500 and called that "progress", under the mistaken belief that the reason boys are 10X more interested in sports has something to do with "oppression" and "opportunity" instead of you know natural human behavior.
IDK I coach youth sports at a very fair handed coed even-minded level. And especially once you hit 10-11 you bleed girls like crazy. There are still plenty of girls interested in sports, but nothing like the boys. Go look at recess at any elementary school in the world. Like half the boys will be playing soccer/tag/whatever EVERY DAY. Meanwhile half the girls are sitting around talking.
It is just reality denialism.