| Yes! This is exactly what I was alluding too in my original comment. I will also add that there are a number of demographic factors that are going to come to a head over the next 10 years or so that are going to put a serious squeeze on non-revenue men's sports: First college enrollment is likely going to drop significantly starting around 2025 due to severely declining birthrates in the US that started during the 2007-2008 financial crisis. It is expected that 2025 will be the smallest graduating high school class in the US in the last 30-40 years. Every college and university is going to be fighting over a smaller pool of applicants. Fewer people are going to attend games and fewer people will be watching college sports on TV which means smaller TV contracts. The percentage of men attending college has been declining, in 2017 57% of college students in the US were women:
https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=98 And it looks like the declining rate of men in higher education is only speeding up:
https://hechingerreport.org/the-pandemic-is-speeding-up-the-... College men and male alumni disproportionately support college athletics, they attend games and donate to the athletic department more than their female counterparts.
Fewer men on campus in the long term likely means less money for the athletic department as a whole:
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/nvsm.34 Lastly, Title IX only requires that sports opportunities for both men and women be proportional to the percentage of men and women in the student body. With only 43% of college students nationwide being men now, and football being the juggernaut of college athletics that it is (with typically over 100 players on a college football team), there will be little room left for any other men's sports in college athletics, and no incentive for the athletic department to keep them around. Over the next decades many men's sports will likely become nearly extinct at the D1 level: tennis, golf, rowing, wrestling, hockey, volleyball, swimming and diving, cross country, even track and field and baseball look to be in big trouble as athletic departments try to keep the revenue from college football flowing in while dealing with these challenging demographic factors. |