University is New Mexico Track/XC still alive, but forced to reduce track/XC roster size

Flotrack article with quote from Coach Joe Franklin

https://www.flotrack.org/articles/6229615-new-mexico-to-reduce-mens-xctrack-roster-spots

Wasn’t the skiing team at New Mexico pretty good?

From what I read it seems they won’t lose any scholarships, just roster spots. So will they just get rid of walk-ons?

Honestly if I were Joe I’d be thrilled. Administration is basically telling him to not even pretend to try to have a balanced program. Men can be all distance runners

Somewhat surprised they are cutting soccer. No matter what you think of the sport it's growing in the Jr. ranks and as FB dies the death of a thousand cuts you would think you would keep soccer around if you could.

I understand a 6 game travel schedule is expensive plus staff costs but this is the state U. in a low pop state and they should be able to budget it if the planning was worth anything at all (which it apparently was not).

Greeeeeeaaaaaat deal wrote:

Honestly if I were Joe I’d be thrilled. Administration is basically telling him to not even pretend to try to have a balanced program. Men can be all distance runners

Exactly. this changes nothing about how the program is truly run.

Tell a lie over and over nearly everyone will eventually be fooled. The big lie: college football always is profitable for college/university. When football stadium is packed on Saturdays; when college football team plays in a large conference with nationally televised games, sure. Forensic accounts need to look at football at U of N.M.

Greeeeeeaaaaaat deal wrote:

Honestly if I were Joe I’d be thrilled. Administration is basically telling him to not even pretend to try to have a balanced program. Men can be all distance runners

The women's team is all that matters to him. He got a bit lucky with Josh Kerr, but this will just give him more time to devote to the women's XC team.

no men no problem wrote:

Greeeeeeaaaaaat deal wrote:

Honestly if I were Joe I’d be thrilled. Administration is basically telling him to not even pretend to try to have a balanced program. Men can be all distance runners

The women's team is all that matters to him. He got a bit lucky with Josh Kerr, but this will just give him more time to devote to the women's XC team.

It won’t impact the men’s team at all. You don’t need more than 10 guys to compete nationally.

Wrong of course wrote:

It won’t impact the men’s team at all. You don’t need more than 10 guys to compete nationally.

False. You need 14.

This basically gives him the green light to no longer have the token in-state athletes on his roster. All foreigners baby.

And he also got lucky with Lee Emmanuel. How many men's NCAA championships does he have to win to cease being lucky?

How many women will be on the xc team and track team? That’s a really small number for the men’s track team. mistvteams have about 50.

Joe has been applying for EVERY position under the sun this summer knowing UNM would hatchet his team.

He got bounced from UW, Oregon and ND... even administrators see that UNM is a card house of transfers and 5th years. Not people he has recruited and developed. Just stolen.

The first article says all of the cuts are coming because UNM needs to reduce its budge and wants the male-female percentage of athletes to mirror the studen body percentage. The article says that UNM is 55.4 female in general enrollment but athletes are only 43.8% of the opportunities. After these cuts, in 2019-20, the athletes will be 57.2 percent female.

The thing I don't get about Title IX is a philosophical one. It's now being interpreted by many that the percentages of athletes at a school should mirror the percentage of men/women at the school. My question is why? No one goes in and makes sure the number of biology majors is equal, engineering majors, etc.

Using the logic of mirroring, why don't the feds insist that the male - female split of a university in enrollment equal the male-female split of society? Doesn't the fact that UNM is 55.4% female show us that men and women like different things, are better at different things, etc? No one is insisting that UNM cut it's female enrollment but yet they are insisting they cut it's male athletes? It makes no logical sense.

Based on the reasoning of title IX, it seems that UNM is discriminating against men by having the school b 55.4% female.

If I were one of these legal outfits, I'd try a lawsuit using that logic. I'm thrilled their solution to that isn't to cut 5% of the women to make it 50-50 but think that men should use this logic in a lawsuit.

There are three tests under Title IX that a school can use to show compliance - one of them is that their percentage of athletes enrolled is proportional to their academic enrollment, but the school could choose to meet one of the other tests (that they're expanding opportunities for the underrepresented sex, or that what they are offering fully accommodates the underrepresented population). Of course, it's easier to just do a percentage - especially when schools want to cut their budgets for sports to accommodate football. If you're got 105 roster spots or whatever for men's football (which I think we can all agree is ridiculous), then you start with a base line of needing 105 women playing sports for your university. The problem isn't the women's cross country team is too big and the men's team gets cut - it's that football is driving all the decisions. Back when these rules were in place they came out on the side of men - more men were in college (it wasn't the 55% to 60% split we see now), so at the very worst it would be 50-50.

In any case, Title IX is about mirroring the student population and not locking out people (well, really women) from educational opportunities. It's not about making fundamental changes at the school, and driving them to, say, admit more women to the university generally (there are other laws/lawsuits for that).

I'm not an expert by any means, but I think if you could show that women were trying to get into engineering, biology, etc. majors and were not being let in, then a Title IX complaint would be appropriate. But when there's open enrollment in a major, and the school isn't like, actively working to keep women out (and there's no internal bullying etc. based on sex), the school doesn't have to cut down their engineering program to match the number of women who enroll. Sports are different - universities (especially larger ones) generally don't have problems filling their women's teams, because there are tons of female athletes out there to choose from (50% of high school girls participate in sports). It's not about filling the spots, then, so it's a different issue than what's going on in the STEM fields (where there are spots for women, but they've traditionally chosen not to take them, due to internalized sexism, the boys' club, etc....and perhaps there's even an issue of men over-enrolling in these fields due to their own internalized sexism about what it means to be a man).

Greeeeeeaaaaaat deal wrote:

Honestly if I were Joe I’d be thrilled. Administration is basically telling him to not even pretend to try to have a balanced program. Men can be all distance runners

For a distance focused team those roster limitations are rough...

He can only have 10 athletes on 20 hours in the fall; he will have a hard time finding 10 distance runners willing to be on 8 hours with no racing in the XC season. He will be effectively limited to 10 to 12 distance guys

If he is fully funded (or close to it) his best bet would be go 10 full ride distance guys. Then use the 2.6 -5 remaining scholarships (because of academic aid he can likely full ride 10 distance runners while saving bits of equivalency here and there) to focus exclusively on a an event that does not get a lot of big scholarships from other schools (high jump/pole vault/javelin). Round out any remaining roster spots with walk-on 400/800m runners from New Mexico.

It hurts to not have distance depth, leaving you no room to develop in the under classes, but you can compensate with all those full scholarships . Would not be a very good conference level track team (but is anyone going to expect him to compete for a MWC title in track?). If you do this well you could remain relevant at the conference and national level in the event areas where you do have athletes.

The fact that football programs carry 100+ athletes is absurd. You need 22 starters, plus 3-5 more guys for special teams. So let's say 26 guys, then another 26 guys so you can have a backup for every single position. Now you're at 52, you really need 48 more guys? Ridiculous. NFL teams have a 53 person roster limit, no college program needs more than 70.

I'd like to know what the running equivalent is for players 70-100 on a mid-level DI football team. Is this like Oregon or Syracuse carrying a bunch of 4:30 milers on their roster?

Bonkers wrote:

The fact that football programs carry 100+ athletes is absurd. You need 22 starters, plus 3-5 more guys for special teams. So let's say 26 guys, then another 26 guys so you can have a backup for every single position. Now you're at 52, you really need 48 more guys? Ridiculous. NFL teams have a 53 person roster limit, no college program needs more than 70.

I'd like to know what the running equivalent is for players 70-100 on a mid-level DI football team. Is this like Oregon or Syracuse carrying a bunch of 4:30 milers on their roster?

Not only do major football teams have 100+ players, they have 85 on full scholarship. So yes, that'd be like Oregon going about 15 deep in the middle distances and having a bunch of 1:55, 4:15, 9:10 hs guys on full rides.

Until football can be held out as its own separate entity and then schools split all the other sports based on enrollment ratios, it'll remain where men are massively discriminated against in non-revenue NCAA sports (based on interest levels and participation at the high school level).

Let's put the Title IX issue in the simplest terms possible; generally speaking, boys like sports more than girls, but they are only allowed to have as many opportunities to play sports as girls have. In that spirit, I think we should advocate for a new law that says beautician schools must enter equal numbers of male and female students. Doesn't that seem entirely reasonable and fair?