Grid irony

A woman's decision could alter college sports as we know it

Donna Shalala, a former Clinton Cabinet officer and now president of the University of Miami, is preparing to make a crucial decision regarding college sports -- quite possibly one with the most far-reaching implications in this area since a century ago, when a president of another sort, Theodore Roosevelt, decreed that we needed a National Collegiate Athletic Association.

Miami, the reigning college football power, is being courted to abandon its conference, the Big East, and join the Atlantic Coast Conference. Simply because Miami is Football U. right now, the switch in itself would be significant. But what makes president Shalala's decision monumental is that if she jumps Miami, then Syracuse and Boston College will also cut and run, and then the Big East will try to grab a couple of replacements from some other conference and on and on it will go, the dominos falling across American college sports.

In a way, even as five of its schools sued Miami, Boston College and the Atlantic Coast Conference on Friday in attempt to halt the raid, the Big East has reaped its own whirlwind. It started off as a neat little northeastern basketball league. But then, the Big East saw all that fat football television money and added football schools -- primarily Miami -- and now it may be paying for its own greed.

Oh my, football. Eventually everything in college sports comes down to football ... and, well, football money. It's really the N.C.F.A. -- the National Collegiate Football Association. The sport is so expensive and involves so many people -- most of them male -- and it is so heavily invested in power and tradition that it really is the sun around which all the other college athletic planets revolve. For example, the disputes over gender equity in Title IX really boil down to football's weighty imbalance.

Nobody much talks about it, but football plays what amounts to an affirmative-action role at smaller colleges. We also have a little gender problem in this country. Girls are smarter than boys. Well, they get better grades. Colleges that would like to keep the male-female ratio near 50-50 are finding that impossible because so many girls are coming out of high school with better credentials than boys. College football teams thus serve the role of providing a catch basin for less-qualified males.

One of the unstated fears athletic directors have about Title IX is not just that half the sports slots go to women. No, they can see the future. They can see 60 percent -- no, 65 percent -- of all sports becoming women's sports, because 65 percent of all students will be female. There will be a football team and a basketball team for men, but everything else in college sports will be for the women -- including, by the way, the athletic directors.

Well, in the long run, maybe this will be good for us increasingly dumber guys. One of the prime reasons boys do so poorly in the classroom is because our culture celebrates male athletic success over male academic success. Parents, in particular, are often guilty of encouraging their sons to strive for athletic scholarships. Daughters -- at least till now -- have, for the most part, concentrated on academics and other leadership goals.

It is not just coincidental that the most important decision in college sports may well be made by Donna Shalala, a woman. All us football players, all us jocks, have made this bed for ourselves.

Sports Illustrated senior contributing writer Frank Deford is a regular contributor to SI.com and appears each Wednesday on National Public Radio's Morning Edition. He is a longtime correspondent for HBO's Real Sports and his new novel, An American Summer (Sourcebooks Trade), is available at bookstores everywhere.

 

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