University of Cincinnati drops men's soccer

[rlb2024]

Hopefully this doesn't become a trend . . .

Cincinnati drops men's soccer

[kevin]

What’s interesting to me is that a lot of conferences are looking to reduce the number of sports that schools are required to offer:

es.pn/2XItUOC

People know about Title IX, of course, and that’s not going anywhere. What I think people don’t realize is that there’s no law that says schools must have a dozen different teams. There’s an NCAA policy that basically says DI schools need to have at least six men’s sports and eight for women. (There’s various other technicalities, but that’s the main idea.) If the university presidents decide they want to get rid of that rule, they can. They can have football, basketball, and then enough women’s sports to balance out football for Title IX purposes. A lot of schools are going to be taking a financial beating over the next few years. Economic problems are going to lead to less government funding from the states. Enrollment is probably going down, just from a demographic perspective of lower birth rates over the past 15-20 years. I think a lot of students will probably choose to attend to live at home and commute to college, leading to less dorm/food income for colleges. A lot of businesses and rich people who are big donors to university athletic programs are going to suffer from the economic downturn associated with the coronavirus pandemic.

And then there’s the name/image/likeness situation, whose details are still up in the air. If a car dealer can donate $50k to a university, or he can give a free car to a football player in exchange for the football player appearing in a few commercials, what do you think he’s going to do? Even when big donations are earmarked for football or basketball, that’s still money going into the athletic department, and that frees up money to support non-revenue sports. But once the NIL stuff is opened up, the money is going to be going straight to the blue-chip football and basketball recruits.

[rlb2024]

Here goes another program -- Appalachian State is dropping men's soccer.  This has a local impact, as Mason Robicheaux from St. Paul's played for App State the last two seasons -- he started every game last season as a sophomore and made the Sun Belt All-Tournament team . . .

App State to drop men's soccer, two other sports

[rlb2024]

I saw today where Mason Robicheaux is transferring to UAB.

[usasoccerboy]

Title IX is always the reason men’s soccer is dropped in the NCAA. The NCAA is the sole reason the USAWNT is better than everyone else, and the main reason why the USAMNT is declining. Nicholls, UNO, and ULM all had men’s programs in the state before title 9 was passed and before the USA had qualified for the 90 World Cup. They were all successful during what was known as the death of soccer days between the demise of the NASL and qualifying for the 90 World Cup. It is bad enough we rely on collegiate soccer to develop the majority of players in our system, yet we continue to allow the southern areas of the country to lag behind the rest of the country, because we do not have viable collegiate programs like the rest of the country.

It would be better if we had a club league system and the south could be the host of such a system, bypassing the college game, if there was interests in the area and players willing to give up their amateur status.