Guest Post: Looking Back at the Title IX Cuts

Chase Kiddy won our prediction contest last week. He decided to write about the athletic department cuts brought about by Title IX. Give it a read and then give him a follow on twitter at @ckiddysports.

Some introductions are in order. My name is Chase Kiddy (yes, that really is my legal name), and I’m a recent JMU grad still living in the metropolis that is Harrisonburg, Virginia. Like Todd (ed. note: only covered one game), I come from the long and distinguished line of Breeze writers that opted for moderate Internet fame over a life of newspaper reporting. I had a stint as the Sports Editor with the Breeze, where I wrote a pretty popular column that some of you might have seen links to across social media (probably this one, where I snarkily wonder aloud where the keg-parties were on Saturdays that were causing so many students to leave the games). I was a National Columnist of the Year finalist in 2012, which is something I’m particularly proud of, since I started writing sports commentary for publication in… well, 2012.

Often at the same time, even on the same days that I was working on JMU’s biweekly newspaper, I also worked for the Athletic Department as a Sports Communication practicum student. Which, as you might imagine, was a little awkward at times. I’m looking at you, A.J. Davis.

I enjoyed the experience though. The whole point of JMU’s surprisingly little-known Sports Comm. program is to expose students to the whole range of Athletics Communication, which means learning about journalism, broadcasting, crisis communication, and more — regardless of what your intended career niche is. And for me, being able to look behind the curtain on both sides of the aisle was a particularly positive experience.

One of the more interesting tidbits I picked up while in Sports Comm was when we were looking at the Title IX cuts that took place back in 2006. Plenty of you are old enough to have already been alumni and watched the slimming down take place eight years ago, but for the younger audience: JMU, realizing it was wildly out of compliance with the Federal Equality “Title 9” Act, elected to cut 10 varsity sports, seven of which (swimming, cross country, indoor and outdoor track, gymnastics, wrestling and archery) were men’s sports. There’s a very well-done article from the New York Times which I highly recommend for further reading.

Title IX can be a complicated thing, but put in 50 words or less: JMU’s athletics population has to roughly represent the population of the University as a whole. Since JMU is famously 61% female, the Athletics population cannot be chock full of a bunch of dudes.

The streamlining of JMU athletics has had some interesting ripple effects. Specifically, I had a mid-level member of the athletic department point out to me a little while ago that the winning percentage of each of the remaining varsity teams has gone up since 2006. I wanted to check in with that little factoid for this guest post, and from what I can tell, it’s mostly true.

Here’s the setup. I took six full athletics seasons from before the 2006 changes (fall of 2000 through spring of 2006), and I put them up against the most recent six seasons, fall of 2008 through spring of 2014. I didn’t have time to look at every sport — I do have a job, after all — but the results are startlingly enough to show a pretty obvious trend.

Women’s Soccer? They jumped from achieving a win in 48.8% of their games (62-53-12) to 56.0% (70-46-9).

Men’s basketball? You can hate on Matt Brady, but don’t forget he’s notched three 20-win seasons at an otherwise irrelevant mid-major. He’s won 49.3% of his overall games (99-102), which sounds middling… until you realize that JMU only won 33.1% of its games (57-115!) from 2001-2006.

And football? Surely football, with the unceremonious end to the Mickey Matthews era, didn’t see a rise in winning. After all, we won the national championship in 2004, which is back in Timeline A!

Nope. JMU was 37-34 over that first six-year stretch. Buffered by the 2008 semifinals run and the better-than-people-remember 2011 team, JMU football was actually 45-27 from 2008-2014, good for a 10% increase in wins.

But women’s basketball is the real winner in all of this. In the six years from the 00/01 season through the 05/06 season, WBB was 107-75, which means they won 58.8% of their games. From ‘08-’09 through last season, WBB was a remarkable 160-51, good for just over 75%. Seventy-five percent! And while I love Kenny Brooks — he and Dave Lombardo are my two favorite JMU coaches — you can’t just attribute a 17% uptick in winning to him, if for no other reason than he’s been at JMU since 2002.

The only downward trend I can find in win percentages from then to now is with baseball, where back-to-back-to-back 30-loss seasons has really tanked the program’s reputation. And in fairness to the athletic department member who gave me the stat, he said it before Spanky & Co. started playing like hot garbage.

It was really smart of JMU to resize the scope of the Athletics to a manageable group of teams. JMU isn’t Alabama — it doesn’t have the resources to field 30 competitive teams. The result is more scholarship money and more focus on the teams that are left, so while I feel bad for the 200 young adults and coaches who were forced out eight years ago, the end product is pretty hard to argue with. JMU varsity sports are thriving — even if the high-profile ones aren’t — and that trickles down into club sports, too. Have you walked into the UREC gym lately? It’s like walking into Boston Garden. There must be two or three club national champions every year at JMU, and that is pretty crazy all by itself.

But what does this all mean? Why is this worth talking about now, eight years after Title IX cuts happened? I suppose part of it is to validate a once-controversial decision, but let’s get real. This, just like everything else on the Internet, eventually comes back to realignment. I strongly believe this is a big below-the-surface talking point on why JMU prefers the infamous “monitoring the situation” line over conference-hopping. Not necessarily the Title IX implications, per se, but the balance that JMU athletics has achieved over the last decade. Non-revenue sports are consistently successful, and at times, even dominant. The Jenga tower is balanced. Do we really want to topple it just for the MAC or the Sun Belt? Let’s be honest here — both are just about as relevant as the CAA, in the grand scheme of big-time college football.

Please don’t confuse my open-mindedness for a bleeding heart defense of not moving up. I’m not saying that I’m not frustrated by the whole situation. My whole family is from West Virginia, and I try to make it up to a WVU game in Morgantown at least once a year. I was there last weekend for a night game against No. 4 Oklahoma in primetime. There were 65,000 people at that game. The atmosphere just simply can’t compare to a JMU game, which makes me incredibly sad. They are 100% different worlds. I’d give just about anything to have that kind of hype here at my own Alma Mater here in Harrisonburg.

But I know it’s a more complicated matter than simply flipping the switch and moving to FBS. So if I’m saying anything on here today, then I guess it’s this: conference realignment is a complex, multi-faceted, and delicate issue that is actively struggled with over in Athletics. Next time you want to vent, I get it. We all get it. But don’t forget to look at all the angles. It might not be as black and white as we sometimes allow ourselves to think.