Trump administration's blatant hypocrisy on Title IX covering player payment is no surprise
President Donald Trump and his acting secretary of the Department of Education took their first real swing at the payment of college athletes on Wednesday, saying that Title IX does not apply to NIL and player payment, rescinding previous guidance from the Biden administration, according to ESPN's Paula Lavigne.
"Without a credible legal justification, the Biden Administration claimed that NIL agreements between schools and student athletes are akin to financial aid and must, therefore, be proportionately distributed between male and female athletes under Title IX," according to a statement from Craig Trainor, the acting assistant secretary for civil rights. "The claim that Title IX forces schools and colleges to distribute student-athlete revenues proportionately based on gender equity considerations is sweeping and would require clear legal authority to support it."
Biden's guidance, which came in the form of a memo just before he left office, dealt specifically with the $20.5 million per year that the power four conferences and the NCAA agreed to share with players as part of settling the House suit over player compensation. Many major universities were planning to use the vast majority of those funds, in some cases close to 95 percent, for men's basketball and football, leaving just five percent for women's basketball and every other sport.
However, Biden said that the settlement money should be treated as "athletic financial assistance" and should therefore be subject to Title IX, which requires equal funds be distributed to male and female athletes. Biden also noted that while NIL did not need to fall under those guidelines, it could trigger Title IX obligations if it created a disparity in the athletic department.
Now, essentially, what the Trump administration is saying is that athletic departments are under no obligation whatsoever to ensure that those funds, nor NIL money, is distributed equally, because Title IX doesn't apply.
The new guidance comes less than a week after Trump's administration signed a sweeping ban of trans athletes from women's sports, under the guise of "protecting" them.
Why would an administration that claims it wants to protect women not want those women to have equal access to money to be paid to play those sports? Shouldn't they want to encourage those opportunities for women, to continue to grow the sport they love?
It's almost like they don't care about protecting those sports at all, almost like they're using Title IX (which prohibits sex-based discrimination in education and requires equal opportunity for varsity sports) as a cudgel to shove an agenda of bigotry through by simultaneously oppressing trans athletes and also denying women the opportunity to be paid for their work.
And make no mistake: if major colleges don't have to pay female athletes, most of them won't. The reason the Biden administration released those guidelines in the first place was that it was becoming abundantly clear that football and men's basketball would be getting the vast majority of the school's mandated funding, leaving women's sports to fed for themselves in an NIL world that was going to be significantly lessened in the new era of college athletics.
Sure, you'll have some exceptions here and there; UConn will certainly pay it's women's basketball players, and Oklahoma might throw a little bit of cash to its softball team. But other than the dominant forces at the top of the sport, the cash flow paying female athletes will dry up without regulation to protect it.
Surely female athletes will still get NIL opportunity, though, right?
Well, about that. By revoking all of Biden's guidance around NIL payments, the administration is also revoking the requirement that male and female athletes be given equal opportunity and access to NIL resources.
It means they won't need to receive equivalent publicity to help land NIL deals, it means schools don't have to promote women's sports with the same level of intensity they do men's or have the women's teams appear in promotional materials at the same rate. And if they don't have to, they won't do it.
How do we know that? According to a 2024 ESPN study, 84 percent of then-Power five schools mentioned men's teams more often than women's teams on their primary social media accounts. On top of that, women's teams were far more likely to have to share social media managers with each other, rather than having one associated with their specific sport. If schools don't have to give equal attention to women's sports, they won't.
Is that not enough evidence for you? Look at the NCAA Tournament, and the way the NCAA has handled the men's and women's events. Go back to the infamous women's tournament in 2021, when Oregon players highlighted the massive difference in their facilities and amenities (like meals) compared to the men's tournament. Part of the reason that changed was the threat of a Title IX lawsuit.
And make no mistake: without that promotion, the women's game will suffer. And ultimately, that's the goal of this guidance. They're not trying to protect women's sports; they've never had any interest in doing that. If you hadn't clocked that before, consider this your wakeup call. Like so many other things in the U.S. right now, the mechanisms that ensure equality for women in athletics are coming under attack, even as those same mechanisms are used to revoke the civil rights of another group of people.
It's hypocrisy in its purest form, pretending to care about something on one hand while gutting the protections designed to ensure its survival and continued growth on the other. It's not surprising, given what we've seen in the last month, but it is and should be rage-inducing.
Andrew Zimbalist, Smith College economics professor emeritus, called the new guidance "reprehensible, " and predicted "There will be an attack on Title IX coming up the next four years."
It started with trans folks. Now, it's mandating equal opportunity for pay. Next? Who knows, but you can bet they won't stop here.
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