Couch: Clemson's Title IX Fears Real Reason Some Men's Sports Saved

Revised financial projections. Yeah, I’m sure that’s all this was for Clemson. Not panic or anything like that. Not that a bunch of women’s sports backers were coming after the football team with the law on their side. Not that the private chef, bowling alley, movie theater, fitted suits or other necessities Clemson football players get in the name of education were in jeopardy.

Hah!

Last week, Clemson announced -- counter to what it had said in the fall -- that it wasn’t going to eliminate its men’s cross country and track and field teams after all. In fact, it’s going to add at least one women’s sport, too. The decision, Clemson said, “comes after revised financial projections show the impacts of COVID-19, while significant, did not harm the University in as drastic a way as anticipated.’’

Hmm. Interesting. I’m calling BS. Just 168 days earlier, athletic director Dan Radakovich announced that the school was eliminating those men’s teams “after a long period of deliberative discussion and analysis.’’ Part of the reason for the cuts, he said at the time, was the “significant financial challenges due to the ongoing pandemic.’’

So what’s happening here? What saved men’s track and cross country? Just an innocent mistake? A miscalculation? A change of fortune at Clemson? Let’s call it this:

The big lie. I can’t speak to Clemson’s specific financial books, but colleges across the country last fall were dropping non-revenue, Olympic sports as fast as possible. Stanford, William & Mary, Iowa, Minnesota, Clemson. The list goes on. The entire sport of college men’s gymnastics is now just about dead.

Now, thanks to the pesky Title IX laws requiring equal opportunities for men’s and women’s athletes in our education system, the national landscape for college football in general is about to be seriously shaken. Universities gushing lavishness on football teams have been out of compliance with Title IX for years. And now they’ve gone too far and are going to be held accountable.

Universities were using what I called “the COVID cover” to cut non-revenue programs. After years of mishandling billions of dollars of revenues from the College Football Playoff and NCAA Tournament by throwing too much money at football, many schools built up massive athletic department debts. They had been looking for a way to cut non-revenue teams, such as tennis, golf, gymnastics, swimming, track, cross country so they could keep over-spending on football. They were pretending that a few months of the pandemic were to blame for those massive debts and not their own gross mismanagement.

There is a misperception that college football teams make a ton of money for schools.

“If you’re accounting properly and counting all the costs,’’ Andrew Zimbalist, a highly regarded sports economist at Smith College, told me in the fall, “you’d probably get only about a quarter of football schools in FBS generating a surplus. They totally mismanage the money.’’

They are hiding the losses in bookkeeping tricks. For example, some schools don’t count the cost of a stadium as a football expense, but instead as a general expense for the school. Colleges then take these pretend football profits and fund Olympic sports with them. So they keep losing more and more money. And rather than cutting back on football costs, they dump tennis, track, gymnastics, etc. and blame COVID.

Supposedly, before one football game had been played without a full stadium, the pandemic had already caused Iowa to be $200 million in debt. So, goodbye men’s swimming.

But now “revised financial projections’’ have saved the day at Clemson? Because Clemson didn’t mention the threatened lawsuits.

California lawyer Arthur Bryant of the firm Bailey Glasser LLP, representing the men’s track and cross country athletes, threatened a suit that said without those sports, Clemson would have just 229 men and 318 women participating in athletics. That’s less than 42% men, which, Bryant claims, would be in violation of Title IX by not giving enough male athletes opportunities.

Meanwhile, Lori Bullock, an Iowa civil rights attorney, was threatening a Title IX suit over the inequities that favored football players at Clemson. Some of her findings were listed in the Greenville News. For example, she said, the football team is given fitted suits to wear while traveling. Women athletes don’t get that. The women’s rowing team, she said, has three athletes sharing each locker. The football team has access to a putt-putt golf course. A professional chef makes three meals a day, seven days a week for the football team all school year. The rowing team gets two meals, four days a week in the dining hall.

And with these lawsuits about to be filed, Clemson began negotiating (read: panicking). A settlement was reached, and the men’s track and cross country teams were reinstated. And Clemson says it will add a women’s sport and perform a gender equity study to make sure it’s in compliance in the future.

This will have major ramifications not just at Clemson, but across the country. My guess is that almost every athletic department across the country, especially ones with football, is in violation of Title IX laws.

Bryant has already gotten settlements from other colleges. He and Bullock are about to change college sports.

It just takes someone to stand up and start the fight against the Big Lie. Or, maybe it was just “revised financial projections.’’



































Written by
Greg earned the 2007 Peter Lisagor Award as the best sports columnist in the Chicagoland area for his work with the Chicago Sun-Times, where he started as a college football writer in 1997 before becoming a general columnist in 2003. He also won a Lisagor in 2016 for his commentary in RollingStone.com and The Guardian. Couch penned articles and columns for CNN.com/Bleacher Report, AOL Fanhouse, and The Sporting News and contributed as a writer and on-air analyst for FoxSports.com and Fox Sports 1 TV. In his journalistic roles, Couch has covered the grandest stages of tennis from Wimbledon to the Olympics, among numerous national and international sporting spectacles. He also won first place awards from the U.S. Tennis Writers Association for his event coverage and column writing on the sport in 2010.