From a logic standpoint that makes sense. Without football many of the non-revenue sports for both men and women would disappear.
Not going to happen though because there are enough politicians out there who don't care about college sports or the athletes but do care about getting re-elected who would jump up to make it about hurting women's rights.
If the NIL payments come out of the university instead of second hand sources T9 immediately becomes an issue. It also though makes the athletes employees of the university meaning that labor laws including minimum wage laws and tax laws become a part of it and even things like OSHA.
The facts need to be clearly stated to them.
1. Title IX was a good piece of legislation that did a lot to improve athletic participation and opportunities for girls and women.
2. However, no legislation is perfect. For example, it requires balanced numbers on scholarships offered and includes football with its 85 scholarships. Unlike many other sports (soccer, track, golf, tennis, basketball, baseball, hockey, etc), there is no female sport that mirrors football and also no female sport which requires such a large roster.
3. The answer cannot be "just cut football" because football creates the vast majority of revenue and drives the vast majority of donations. Without it, there's no money to offer so many other sports or any other sports at the level of coaching, training and facilities they currently do. Eliminating football would dramatically decrease opportunities for other female athletes, having the opposite impact intended by Title IX.
4. The imperfect answer to meeting Title IX has been to tilt the wheel. For example, women's basketball teams issue more scholarships than men's teams. They don't want or need those extra scholarships. So often they grant scholarships to students who play against the team in practice. These practice scholarships are generally given to men since they can give better competition. Those scholarships are counted by Title IX as women's sports scholarships and in these cases end up being counterproductive for equality in gender participation. More problematic, Title IX goals were achieved in large part by reducing opportunities for men rather than increasing opportunities for women. Sports such as wrestling and men's volleyball have basically been killed due to Title IX. And the highest participation sports among boys, soccer, is usually not offered as a scholarship college sport.
5. Based on recent rulings that college athletes can be paid through sponsors, companies and boosters are funneling millions into Collectives that almost exclusively pay football players - the only college sport people care enough about to spend enough money on to fund university athletics. But this system is unregulated, leading to corruption and also to football athletes not having an entity which can protect their rights and avoid exploitation.
6. The colleges want to address this by eliminating Collectives and paying the football athletes directly under uniform rules which protect player welfare and have accounting transparency. This is fiscally impossible under Title IX because it would require every scholar athlete for every sport to be paid the same as football players. The only option colleges would have if they wanted to address the problems of exploitation and malfeasance under current Title IX would be to:
A. Eliminate even more scholarship sports except for revenue generators like football and both men's & women's basketball.
B. Decouple these revenue sports from the non-profit athletic department as a for-profit business that wouldn't be subject to Title IX.
In summation, the only question before us is whether we want to save college scholarship sports opportunities by revising Title IX with a football exception. Because colleges rely on football too much to eliminate it and will be forced to eliminate pretty much every other sport if nothing is done.
