Given:
 
a)  football teams can have nearly 100 members (80+ scholarships + walkons)
b)  wrestling teams can have more than 30 members
c)  a very small number of women desire to participate in these sports
 
then I'd say that schools that have 226 male athletes and 130 female athletes looks pretty fair (in terms of raw numbers).  Financial expenditure is a different matter - maybe the standard should be that schools have to spend the same amount per athlete for a women's team that it does for the equivalent men's team.  Football and wrestling could then still draw resources away from other sports, but at least it would happen equally to men's and women's teams in the other sports.
 
Looking solely at numbers of participants, if there is no exclusion for football, I see 4 choices for a school to come into compliance, none of which seem that great:
 
1)  Cut the football team.  HAHAHAHAHA!
2)  Cut enough other men's teams to be equivalent to cutting a football team.  Doesn't seem fair to men who play those sports.
3)  Add 100 slots to existing women's teams.  This would result in much less playing time per participant - how many bench sitters would remain on these expanded teams?  Do women's teams at Div I schools cut 100 athletes a year (who really would have stuck with the team in spite of getting no playing time)?  If so, this could be a workable solution.
4)  Add enough other women's teams to attract 100 additional female athletes.  Again, there is no guarantee that those slots would be filled.  Secondly, it doesn't seem fair to me to offer women's basketweaving but not men's (just as I don't think it's fair that some of the 44 schools that had Div 1 men's hockey this season didn't offer women's hockey).
 
Counting the minutes until October......
 
Robb Newman
 
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