With Title IX's goal of assuring fairness in athletic spending, it can be tempting to blame football teams for eating up so much of colleges' athletic budgets -- or to argue that football teams, unlike many women's sports, bring in impressive revenues that justify high expenditures.
At Dartmouth, there is evidence to support both sides: football has annual expenditures that dwarf most other teams, but so do its revenues.
Although Dartmouth's football expenditures do not compare to those of powerhouses like the University of Texas, where operating budgets top $10 million, the nearly $1 million spent on Dartmouth's football team last year--as compared to the approximately $2.7 million divided between the sixteen other varsity men's teams -- begs the question of whether football is eating up more than its share of men's sports funding.
But Dartmouth athletic officials say that the current football budget covers the necessities without taking away from other teams -- male or female.
"Our other teams are not suffering because of our football -- but they are in a lot of other schools," Dartmouth Athletic Director Jo Ann Harper said.
Head Football Coach John Lyons agreed.
"I don't think it's as much about taking money from other sports here -- you just want to run your program and know that relative to your opponents it's a good program," Lyons said.
Much of the current debate over football teams stems from the well-publicized revelation that, contrary to popular perception, football is a money loser, not a money maker, for most schools. According to the National Collegiate Athletic Association, only about 70 teams in the country actually make a profit.
Skeptics wonder why such a large percentage of athletic budgets goes into funding teams that lose so much money, while others argue that the nature of the sport, with its expensive equipment and multiple coaches, make such spending necessary if a team wants to be competitive.
Title IX does not require schools to spend equally on men's and women's sports overall, but it does stipulate equitable opportunities for men and women to participate in sports and equal treatment of male and female athletes in all areas.
Given these requirements, it is sometimes hard to see how to fit football fairly into the picture. Schools struggle with how to treat a sport that adds approximately 100 males to the athletic program, but also garners considerable attention from its fans -- some of whom make significant donations to the school.
Dartmouth expenditures are higher for football than for other teams partly because Dartmouth fields 107 football players, a number much higher than any other sport, Harper said. With so many players, per athlete expenditure for football is actually about average compared to other sports, she said.
"Football is just the pink elephant that sits out there for everybody to notice," Harper said.
However, Dartmouth calculates per athlete expenditure based on a team's operating budget -- which includes the cost of equipment and uniforms, but not of paying coaches and recruiting.
When the total amount of money spent on a team -- including coaches' salaries and money spent recruiting -- is considered, Dartmouth spends $9,207 on each football player, compared to an average per athlete expenditure of $6,539. But the College also spends $30,257 for each of the 13 members of the women's basketball team.
A number of seemingly hidden factors contribute to the team's $1 million annual expenditures, Lyons said. He cited the 12 coaches' salaries, the cost of traveling to find recruits and of hosting 70 recruits, as well as the cost of participating in competition -- including buying home and away uniforms for 100 players and providing transportation and lodging for away games.
Harper said that Dartmouth's approach toward football is markedly different than that of big Division IA schools, some of whom reap huge profits from their teams. For instance, Dartmouth allows only 62 of its players to travel to games, foregoes extras like having football teams stay in hotels the night before home games and does not grant athletic scholarships, she said.
"We don't do all the frills and all the bells and whistles," Harper said. "We try to give our kids the coaching and the equipment they need to be safe and play well."
Both Lyons and members of the team agreed that the bare necessities are covered -- but that doesn't necessarily translate into giving the team the arsenal it needs to be competitive, they said.
"What's happened with football in our league is that schools have spent a lot of money upgrading their teams and their stadiums," Lyons said, noting that this often translates into a spending war -- and one that can be hard for Dartmouth to keep up with.
"On the whole, the general feeling among the team is that we're pretty underfunded," football player Aaron Brown '05 said.
Nevertheless, Dartmouth's football team boasts an office with a staff of twelve including Lyons: eight assistant coaches, offensive and defensive coordinators. In addition, there are two administrative assistants.
This may sound like a lot, Lyons said, but the number is warranted. Not only does he need enough assistant coaches to help him lead a team that starts pre-season with 110 players, but he sends his staff all over the country to recruit future players.
As for the number of players, because Ivy League players are not bound by athletic scholarship to play, it is necessary to cultivate more players than the team actually needs to account for inevitable attrition over the four years, Lyons said.
Furthermore, the frequent injuries players receive mean that teams need to have several back-ups for each position, he added.
Some schools have gone so far as to eliminate their football teams, but it is not always clear the extent to which their decisions were motivated by Title IX and gender equity in athletic spending.
To much media fanfare, Boston University nixed its football team in 1997, citing the team's losing streak, declining popularity and annual revenues of only about $100,000 as being insufficient to justify the $3 million dollars spent on the team annually. But some opponents of the move felt BU had sacrificed football to comply with Title IX.
Indeed, much of the money formerly spent on football -- about one quarter of BU's entire athletic budget -- eventually found its way into the budgets of women's teams. For instance, money formerly spent on football scholarships went to scholarships for women athletes, and around the time football was eliminated, BU added women's soccer and lacrosse teams, BU Athletic Director Gary Strickler said.
But critics of such cuts argue that schools eliminate football to the detriment of their men's athletic programs rather than to the advantage of women's teams.
Spending on men's and women's teams should be based on student interest, rather than on "an arbitrary numerical formula," said Jessica Gavora, author of the influential "Tilting the Playing Field: Schools, Sports, Sex and Title IX."
"You can kill any men's sport but that doesn't mean it will create more opportunities for women," Gavora said. "These are complicated issues that schools should be able to decide themselves without the federal government telling them how to do it. This notion that football teams have to be cut or otherwise there won't be opportunities for women is bull."
But Strickler said there was no direct transfer of funds from football to women's sports. He described the process as "a reallocation plan carried out over several years to upgrade women's teams" and stressed the football team's poor performance and paltry game attendance.
The negative reaction from BU football supporters was typical, according to the Women's Sports Foundation director Donna Lopiano. "The football lobby has been so strong that no one has been willing to touch it," Lopiano said.
"Very powerful people want to control their football programs like they are professional teams," she added. "It puts the college president between a rock and a hard place in terms of gender equity in athletics. The football coach is more important because he gives the big donor what he wants."
