Towson University Follows Game Plan Perfectly

Proportionality is a math term y'all learned about in school, right?  Guys at Towson University are learning that it means your sport's cut!

Baseball and men's soccer are being dumped to comply with Title IX's proportionality prong.  Men's swimming actually survived the cuts, and men's tennis will be added.  That'll leave TU with six (6) men's sports.  The gals have thirteen (13) to choose from.  Read more here.

(pic via Baltimore Sun)

Maravene Loeschke, the university’s president, said the cuts were caused by the school’s need to comply with federal Title IX mandates and less revenues from student fees. Eliminating the non-revenue generating programs will allow the school to fund more competitive teams like football and basketball, a report released Friday by Towson said.

Love the way she threw in the "non-revenue" bit.  Always a great fib when yer lookin' to do a little program-killin'.

Fact is, the so-called "revenue" sports usually show a greater net loss than the "non-revenue" sports!  Foosball programs can lose millions of dollars annually, yet they're still referred to as revenue sports.  Even if men's swimming costs a school a hundred grand and it's classified as non-revenue...and John Q. Public continues to buy that bullcorn...

Attention, fools, nearly all intercollegiate sports are non-revenue!!!

TU sure did this one "by the book", didn't they?  They even got an outside entity (Nevins & Associates) to do the "hit" for them:

Towson originally commissioned in October a report examining the cost of eliminating baseball and men’s soccer.

Wait!  Wait!  There's more!!  Loeschke has been very well-coached.  She remembered to include the old "our other programs will become stronger" to justify dumping baseball and soccer:

Cutting men’s soccer and baseball will make the school’s athletics programs more competitive overall by devoting more resources to less teams, Loeschke said. The school’s football program was revived in 2011 with a 9-3 record and its first-ever FCS playoff appearance. Towson’s men’s basketball program posted the largest turnaround in single-season turnaround in NCAA history, going from 1-31 in 2011 to 18-13 this season.

Those programs, combined with Towson’s lacrosse teams, are revenue drivers for the school, Loeschke said. Cutting men’s soccer and baseball should help the school’s other athletic teams succeed, she said.

“If you’re not going to be somewhat competitive, you shouldn’t be in the game at all,” Loeschke said.

I find it very hard to believe that the Towson Tigers men's lacrosse program generates enough revenue to stay in the black.  In fact, I'd be shocked if any of the three programs she mentioned as "revenue drivers" even break even.