A 1972 statute set the arithmetic of a scholarship

The law and what it actually requires

Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 is thirty-seven words in its operative clause, prohibiting sex discrimination in any educational programme receiving federal financial assistance. Most people associate it with women's sports, which is accurate but incomplete. In the context of an athletic department, Title IX does not mandate equal spending on every sport. It mandates proportionality: the share of athletic participation opportunities offered to women must roughly mirror the share of women in the undergraduate student body. At most regional universities — the kind that run Sun Belt programmes in Monroe or Lafayette — women constitute somewhere between fifty-two and sixty percent of enrolled undergraduates. That enrollment figure is not a suggestion. It is the denominator from which every roster decision flows.

The Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights has, since a 1979 policy interpretation and a 1996 clarification, offered three ways to demonstrate compliance. The first and most legally durable is the proportionality test: participation rates match enrollment rates within a narrow margin. The second is a history of expanding opportunities for the underrepresented sex. The third is demonstrating that the existing programme fully and effectively accommodates the interests and abilities of that sex. In practice, most athletic departments at public universities aim for the first prong because the other two require ongoing documentation and are harder to defend in litigation. Proportionality is a number. You can audit a number.

Football as the multiplier

Here is where the roster arithmetic becomes punishing. A Football Bowl Subdivision programme is permitted up to 85 scholarship players. A Football Championship Subdivision programme — Grambling State, Southern, McNeese State, Nicholls, Northwestern State — is capped at 63. Those are scholarship limits; headcount rosters run considerably higher, often into the nineties or beyond for FBS and over a hundred for FCS when walk-ons are counted. Every male body on the participation roster requires a corresponding female participation opportunity, calculated against that proportionality benchmark. Football, by sheer scale, is the sport that makes the equation hardest to balance.

A Sun Belt programme like ULM or Louisiana in Lafayette carries an 85-scholarship football roster. If the compliance target requires, say, 54 percent female participation and the total athletic roster sits at 500 participants, then roughly 270 of those slots must go to women. Football alone accounts for a large fraction of the male side. The women's sports added or expanded to reach that number — cross-country, tennis, soccer, volleyball, golf, track — each carry scholarship costs, coaching salaries, travel budgets and equipment lines. None of them generate the gate revenue that even a modest football programme can claim. The guarantee game, the fee a smaller programme receives to travel and lose at an SEC venue, exists partly to cover exactly this cross-subsidy: football revenue underwrites women's sports, which Title IX requires the department to fund at proportionate scale.

The arithmetic is not abstract. Louisiana Tech, competing in Conference USA rather than the Sun Belt, operates on a similar structural logic. Tulane, a private institution in New Orleans, faces the same federal statute. Grambling State and Southern, playing in the SWAC, are FCS programmes with a lower scholarship ceiling, but the proportionality obligation does not diminish with the division. A smaller football budget does not reduce the compliance calculation; it just makes the cross-subsidy harder to achieve.

What it costs and where the pressure concentrates

The compliance cost falls unevenly on departments that cannot rely on television revenue to fill the gap. In 2023, the NCAA's financial data confirmed what anyone watching a Sun Belt budget already knew: the median FBS athletic department outside the power conferences generates revenue well below the median operating expense. The gap is closed by institutional subsidy — a direct transfer from the university's general fund or student fees — and by the guarantee fee collected when the programme plays at Tiger Stadium or the Caesars Superdome for a payday game. That fee, typically well over a million dollars for an FBS non-conference road game at an SEC venue, does not land in a football-only account. It lands in the athletic department's general pool, and Title IX compliance is one of the obligations that pool must cover.

The pressure concentrates at the roster margin. A department adding a scholarship sport — or expanding an existing one — to stay inside the proportionality window must find recurring money: not a one-time payment, but scholarships renewed annually, a coaching salary paid every twelve months, and travel and equipment costs that inflate with the rest of the economy. Cutting a men's sport is the other lever, and it is a blunt one. When a programme eliminates men's wrestling or men's tennis to improve its proportionality ratio, it is not doing so because those sports are unimportant. It is doing so because the math demands it and the alternative is federal exposure. The Office for Civil Rights can open a compliance review; a sustained finding of non-compliance can, in theory, cost the institution its federal financial assistance, which at any public university is an existential threat.

Eddie Robinson's world ran on a different set of numbers

It is worth noting that the statute arrived during a period when several of the most consequential coaching careers in Louisiana football were already underway. Eddie Robinson had been at Grambling since 1941 and was building what would become the most prolific pipeline of NFL players from any historically Black college or university in the country. Doug Williams came through that programme in the mid-1970s, just as the Title IX compliance machinery was beginning to take institutional shape. The SWAC, like every conference with federal funding attached, had to adapt its member institutions' athletic structures to the new arithmetic. Robinson's programme was not exempt. The scholarship math that governed Grambling's football operation from 1972 onward was shaped by the same statute that governed every other federally-funded athletic department in the country, regardless of tradition or historical weight.

The first and most legally durable is the proportionality test: participation rates match enrollment rates within a narrow margin.

The statute did not change what coaches like Robinson did on the field. It changed the budget environment in which they operated, because women's athletic opportunity now had to be funded at proportionate scale from the same pool of money that paid for everything else. A dollar spent meeting Title IX compliance at a small FCS school is a dollar not spent on a football scholarship or a facility upgrade or a guarantee-game travel fee. The tradeoffs are real, recurrent and structural. They are also, by design, the point: the law is redistributive in a specific and calculated way, and the arithmetic it imposed in 1972 has never been revised out of the budget line.

Every Sun Belt athletic director running the numbers on a Thursday afternoon in Monroe or Lafayette or Shreveport is, in a direct and literal sense, doing arithmetic that a statute written fifty-three years ago specified. The roster is not built the way it is because someone decided it should be. It is built the way it is because the law says it must be, and the law is audited, not argued.

The record, in figures

The material below is the documented substance behind the piece: dates that can be checked, capacities as they are published, and figures as they were reported at the time.

The three compliance tests

• Proportionalityfemale participation share matches female enrollment share; the most commonly used and legally durable prong
• Expanding opportunitiesa demonstrated, ongoing history of growing women's athletic access; requires sustained documentation
• Full accommodationexisting women's programme meets interest and ability demand; hardest to defend if challenged

Key numbers and their years

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