The University of New Mexico’s athletic director and president together published a letter on the school’s athletic website this week announcing that an independent review had found the school struggling to meet federal Title IX requirements.
The letter was published along with the full report, which provided several recommendations to the school on how to regain Title IX compliance.
Title IX is best known for its mandates on gender equality. In the letter, athletic director Eddie Nuñez notes that understanding Title IX compliance can be complicated, but says “it is clear from the independent review that the University is falling short.” The school added beach volleyball as a women’s sport in 2015, which gave UNM temporary compliance and a grace period, but that program’s lack of a full-time head coach and lack of an on-campus facility are now issues for the school in its endeavors to meet Title IX’s requirements.
To make matters worse, the athletic department is also struggling with its own budget. The letter says that financial audits have “led to the conclusion that aggressive action to create significant savings will be required to avoid jeopardizing the future integrity of the entire athletic program.”
The report itself notes that women’s swimming & diving was UNM’s first women’s intercollegiate sport, added to the athletic department in 1972. The school now has 12 women’s sports and 10 men’s sports. But scholarships heavily favor the men. According to the report, the total scholarships spent on the football team ($2.93 million) are greater than the scholarship dollars spent on all of the school’s women’s sports combined ($2.83 million).
The report makes a number of suggestions, including shuffling roster sizes to bring the school into participation balance. As of 2016-2017, the school’s athletic department had participation from 317 men and only 247 women. 110 of those men are on the football team. The report recommends boosting the women’s swimming roster from 22 to 35.
You can read the UNM letter here and the full report here.
They don’t have an on-campus facility for beach volleyball? It’s the desert, there’s sand everywhere.
Give them bread and circuses; or in modern English, Wall Mart and football. The ruling class would rather drop universities than football. Romans gave free food and staged games/spectacles in the Colosseum. They also kept their slaves in dorms and trained them. The entrances to the field/floor at the Colosseum resemble football stadium entrances. Crowds cheered when a slave was killed, in football games they cheer hits that can kill, if not the act of killing (some do that too). As long as we have Wall Mart and football, we are happy. Long live football!
That is the worst pep talk I’ve ever heard.
Pep talk?
As an academic and one of the belief that football is a heathen sport, I rather enjoyed your comparison to Ancient Rome. Forget the problems plaguing the Republic – we have football! All eyes on the field, there is nothing to see here, just wings, beer, and football!
Over 100 on the football team is a travesty
So many people thinking football is taking too much? Ok. Get rid of football.
Now…what do you think happens?
When did he say get rid of football? When has anyone said get rid of football? You just made that up.
Why is it looked down on for kids to walk on, pay for school, and play football? Most swim teams have numerous walk on’s looking for a chance to get a chance to participate.
I don’t understand how there can be 110 football players on a team. The NFL has a 45-man roster limit. There are third-string, right inside linebackers and some QBs that never step foot on the field in any game throughout an entire college career.
If they (or any college) wants to trim their budget discrepancies, they can put a roster limit on football teams. I seriously doubt this will impact their income at all. In fact, it’s probably a positive for the budget: pay for fewer football scholarships and still get the same revenue from TV, gate, bowl games, and the conference pot.
110: you can’t even put #100-110 on a jersey. If someone doesn’t have a full-time… Read more »
I agree with you completely. But, the NFL roster size is 53, not 45. There are way too many college football players on the collegiate roster and there are too many scholarships for football.
Unfortunately a lot of the spending is also done with 1 of 2 mindsets at play :
1) “If you build it they will come” mentality where the departments spend money (and go into debt) thinking what they are doing will lead to increased fandom and revenue. It doesn’t happen and then they can’t cut the only sports that have any hope of creating revenue (even if they don’t right now) but have to cut things like swimming, etc.
Recent examples are things like UofB or EMU. The fact that AD’s keep their jobs after this BS is unreal.
2) The other mindset is more like asset stripping in business – the spend on football and basketball to… Read more »
Football has 85 FULL RIDE scholarships- no partial scholarships allowed. Many teams will carry additional walk ons. Walk on athletes get the same access to facilities, training tables and everything a scholarship athlete does. I don’t see walk ons in football going away anytime soon. Coaches and AD’s like Wisconsin’s Alverez have built success with walk ons (read “Walk on This Way” )- JJ Watt and his brothers, are just a few of the examples. So, because they don’t start doesn’t mean they aren’t good enough to play. Those “extra” players are used as scout team members to prepare the team for the upcoming games. Doubt they would use scholarship players as scout team members. Could they drop the 85… Read more »
Football at most big universities funds all the other sports. The only reason you have the majority of the other sports is because of this. There are very few schools that operate in the positive for any other sport, some can do it in basketball, and only a couple in volleyball. If football were to absorb all the money it takes in, say goodbye to a ton of student athletes and free college for them. This stirs the whole debate more of why aren’t we paying football players in college considering how much money they bring into universities.
I’m all for diversity in sport in college, but when cuts come, people need to understand that the ones that are… Read more »
I don’t get why most don’t understand this? You think football is taking too many resources? You want schools to prioritize all sports equally? Ok. Get rid of football. And watch every single other program bite the dust. Maybe basketball at some schools might survive.
Nobody said take away football in this comment. They said limit the rosters and scholarships which would actually level the playing field and wouldn’t hurt the popularity at all. If you are going to make an argument at least respond to what is being said instead of creating your own narrative randomly then saying “other people don’t understand this”.
No football at our school, and all our sports are doing just fine. The cost of adding football would kill at least some of our programs.
@Huskerpower, would you please cite your assertion? Less than 20% of D1 Athletic programs turn a profit; thus, the statement that “Football at most big universities funds all the other sports” is inaccurate (http://www.ncaa.org/about/resources/media-center/news/athletics-departments-make-more-they-spend-still-minority).
Tim – to clarify, this just means that football net minus cost of sports funded by football is less than 0 for the other 80% of the teams.
I remember in the past having seen this data split out by men’s basketball, football, women’s basketball, and ‘everything else’ lumped into one, but doesn’t look like they do that anymore. Can say pretty confidently that those 20% have football programs that turn a profit. Can’t say with certainty that the other 80% don’t without the splitout by program data.
They need all those players because football has a high injury rate. It is at 100 percent (not all miss a game but all are injured ). Add to that the risk of CTE, the push of linemen toward obesity with all its risks, etc and …..
I keep saying it and I will keep saying it. If we want to protect swimming and other Olympic sports pass federal legislation requiring that colleges who accept federal funds must use a majority of their budgets on men’s and women’s OLYMPIC sports.
I’d suggest that colleges that accept federal funds use the majority of their budgets on academics.
Po-ta-to / po-tah-to
Eliminate professors, class requirements and all administrators. Infuse the funds into athletics, ROTC and frats/sororities. Heck then the students will have fewer constrains and more fun!!!
They already did that at Louisville! (C-A-T-S Cats Cats Cats!)
Obvious point is to use university funds from federal sources (or even state or student) not be used on the revenue sports. Let the NCAA which make hundreds of millions fund them. And maybe direct the new betting revenue to support athletics.
Great article on Title IX and how adding 13 female swimmers will help the school come into compliance.
NCAA schools are allowed to have MORE scholarships for women’s sports then men in: SWIMMING, TRACK, BASKETBALL, SOFTBALL-Baseball, TENNIS and GOLF. Sounds like Gender Equity to me!
To bad there is no “Gender Sport Specific Equity!”. Which would give women and men in the same sport the same number of scholarships.