News
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.
