And so it begins....

Tailgater said:

MikeDamone said:

Tailgater said:

MikeDamone said:

Tailgater said:

RaceBannon said:

Pay the players? Sure as long as Suzy the softball player gets paid the same. Title 9. Not so easy now. Its not like that money is going in someone's pocket. Its funding the program and all the other programs.

Title 9 isn't universal in that equal opportunity to play and receive a full ride scholarship can't and won't be the same as equal pay for unequal play. Neither softball nor any women's sport can be considered a vocation when it costs more to play than the earnings generated from playing for the entertainment of paying spectators.

If anything, paying college athletes could eventually blow Title 9 out of the water with respect to any university's athletic department business contributions from football and men's basketball. No judge living on mars or even in the womb of Women's Liberation could mandate equal pay for unequal play when comparing softball to football. We may be fare in an American way, but we are not communists.

Yes, a judge could mandate that. A softball player putting in the same hours as a football player would certainly be paid the same. The government and courts would have it no other way.

Wrong. Title 9 applies specifically to the opportunity of receiving the benefits of playing collegiate sports as a scholarship-athlete. It has never applied to productivity in terms of value of athletic performance to the product services provided for the paying public by the university's athletic department...... simply because without payroll for participating athletes, there can be no productivity for comparison of softball to football. Aside from Title 9, equal pay for equal work statutes could only be applied where a comparison of productivity for softball versus football is available..... and that will never be possible until softball as a revenue producing sports-entertainment product is equal in value to the university as that of football.

Wrong... Congress or a judge could absolutely enforce title 9 or even if the football players get put on the payroll and the softball players don't. Allowing football players to be employees simply won't happen unless they allow women to play football and enforce their participation through quotas.

Irregardless, it's a mute point. Players won't be put on payroll or be paid in our lifetime. They can choose the offer to play that is on the table, or they can chose not to play. There is no shortage of quality players who will play for the current form of compensation. It would have to be forced with through the courts (it won't be) or players will have to elect not to play (they won't)

I'm not saying that softball playing athletes wouldn't be paid small wages to make their college life easier, they just wouldn't be paid nearly as much as football playing athletes. No court is going to rule that all sports offered by the university for public consumption are of equal value and thus the work required to produce such sports entertainment must be equal. By your logic, Title 9 mandates that UW's head softball coach must be paid the same as UW's head football coach, that a female TA in english 101 must be paid the same as a full professor in pre-med, etc. Once colleges and universities decide to pay athletes something other than scholarship and subsistence expenses, equality in collegiate athletics becomes a different game where Title 9 doesn't play.