re: I know a lot of you hate Title IX, but your blame is misplaced...

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Another idea is that schools could partially exempt football by turning a profit. If a school turns a profit at football, it agrees to pay federal taxes on the income and in exchange, each football scholarship will only count as a certain percentage towards Title IX compliance. The larger the profit, the bigger the exemption (so long as it is capped – the key is here is you don’t want schools claiming a profit for Title IX but not for tax purposes. You want an exemption? Pay Uncle Sam).

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I think it is a clever idea but one that would be ripe with unintended consequences.

Cooking teh books would become a major past-time for athletic departments in general. When I was doing a residency at a Big 12 school they were already doing things that I considered unfair referrals of costs.

For example, their athletic department wanted an olympic sized swimming pool for their meets instead of the old pool they were using... and they packaged that new facility (among other things) into a new center that was paid for by raising mandatory student fees. There really was no justification for that IMO - an Olympic sized pool in lieu of a smaller pool is only a major improvement for the athletic department (not the 5-20 regular morning swimmers on most campuses)

It is easy to see that (in places where this is not already done) certain things like school bands would no longer be the responsibility of the athletic department, they would be foisted onto other (essentially shell) departments purely for the purpose of deceptive accounting... and the more of this type of misdirection/cheating the system you can do... the more money you are allowed to pour into athletics