Apathy spurs fudged Title IX numbers

Texas A&M won a national championship in women's basketball last month, defeating Notre Dame in the final.

The Aggies then jumped around and hugged one another, all 13 players and their coaches and team managers.

You have to wonder if those other 19 or so players felt just as euphoric.

You know. The group that includes the team's male players.

Numbers might have varied some this season, but Texas A&M in the 2009-10 school year counted 32 players to its women's roster, 14 of which were men.

It is part of a report released this week by the New York Times in regard to how colleges are deceptively undermining Title IX, the 1972 federal law that prohibits gender discrimination but over the years has proven increasingly soft on the issue of compliance.

The tricks to beef up participation numbers for women are old and the reasons clear.

Question is, does anyone care?

Here's the thing: We live in a country that passed Title IX, and every institution that receives research grants or federal money in any form should comply with all parts of our Constitution, of which equality is a major tenet. This includes UNLV.

Here's the thing: It's not that simple.

The Rebels are not perfect in their Title IX compliance, and yet they're also not Texas A&M counting everyone but the janitor for women's basketball, or South Florida, where more than half of the 71 women on the cross country roster never ran a race in 2009 and some reportedly had no clue they were on the team.

UNLV fields 10 sports for women and seven for men. They have 221 male athletes and 170 female, which means 43.5 percent walking around campus are women. That's too low.

But according to the most recent numbers from the Department of Education, UNLV lists 258 female athletes, meaning it claims to have 88 more than exist, meaning it does what others do and counts the same females two and three times depending on the sports in which they compete.

Some are in cross country, outdoor track and indoor track. One female counted three times.

This doesn't happen because Jim Livengood is evil and hates Title IX and doesn't believe in equality. He's an athletic director running a business and can't afford women's sports that produce zero dollars without fudging the numbers for compliance.

Men's sports last year had a direct revenue stream of $14.8 million at UNLV. Those on the women's side had one of $191,572.

It's why $42 million of a $61 million athletic department budget for the Rebels is not allocated by gender, a way schools hide the fact they spend the majority of dollars and man-hours on men's sports. It's also why 69.8 percent of recruiting expenses go to men at UNLV.

How much sweat and toil for marketing and ticketing and tutoring and training do you believe is pointed toward women?

Yep. Hardly any.

I'm not saying it's wrong. It's the reality of spending the most on what returns the most.

The problem with Title IX compliance was, is and always will be football, which more than anything has led to the cutting of men's sports across the country and schools padding their numbers on the women's side with male practice players, which, by the way, the Department of Education has no issue.

(Good news for Texas A&M.)

But when you allot 85 scholarships and more than 100 participation spots to football, you have to discover an equal slice of the pie on the women's side.

Football became too big, too powerful. Yes, it makes most of the money. It also uses most of the resources.

Sorry. Division I football could survive with 40 scholarships and participation numbers of 80. It could. It also would solve most if not all Title IX issues overnight.

I'm just not holding my breath this ever will be a majority opinion.

"It's a tough thing for those of us with football," Livengood said. "Being in (compliance with Title IX) can be a slippery slope, but I think we've been able to maintain a good balance with 10 sports for women and seven for men."

It could be worse. UNLV could be held to the same standards as state schools in California, where legislation dictates schools strictly hit their participation numbers, meaning UNLV in such a situation would have to immediately add 51 scholarship female athletes and more sports.

Where would those dollars come from?

Title IX wasn't written solely for women. Men can claim violations and have. It's also true anyone can walk off the street and into a local chapter of the Office for Civil Rights and log a Title IX complaint without cause.

Then why doesn't it happen more?

Why aren't telephones in athletic departments ringing off the hook with calls from the OCR? Why doesn't a report like that in the New York Times this week bring more outrage?

My best guess: Few, if any, care.

Las Vegas Review-Journal sports columnist Ed Graney can be reached at egraney@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-4618. He can be heard from 3 to 5 p.m. Monday and Thursday on "Monsters of the Midday," Fox Sports Radio 920 AM. Follow him on Twitter: @edgraney.