Should we go nickel back?
Here? Is that?
Is that?
Is that what we're doing?
Yeah, old Ken Palmer, I shout out to Ken Palm. Our music bumps on the show today are simply songs that we think are bad, but millions of other people seem to love. We did a little train earlier, came back a little nickelback, which one am I missing?
We did one other. I did imagine dragons.
You did imagine dragons, which is perfect our next guest. As soon as the US Department of Education handed down the ruling on the title nine, I guess I'll call it guidance. I thought of Amy Donaldson, who joins us on a Thursday. Amy, give me one song that a lot of people seem to like and you just think is horrible.
Oh wow, Oh yeah, I'm not prepared for this. My musical taste is just not in alignment with anybody I know. I grew up listening to classical music and country old country music, you know, like Hank william Senior. So I don't know things that everybody. I mean, anything by you.
Too, Okay, all right, okay, fair enough obsession.
I'm not saying Bono isn't a great human being. I'm saying I don't understand the love on the music side.
Okay, all right, fair enough. He that's a great thing about Oh, that's a great thing about music. What is for some may not be for others.
All right, how you been? What are you working on? What's the latest in the world of Amy Donaldson.
I'm working on too many things. Some high school investigations. I think I've talked about it before, the international students coming to the US to play, So still working on that, working on a podcast and some stories. It's also probably going to be reviving my column in the next little bit, so look for that. And working on a lot of really cool stuff in women's sports. So and I have two fosters who are looking for home. If anybody needs.
A laugh, Okay, okay, there you go.
Hey, Before we get to the ruling or I guess I'll just say the memo from the US Department of Education about this new title nine understanding. I did want to get your take on the fact that after setting a single season record for points and setting a single season record for goals scored, and finishing third in the West and making the playoffs, although losing in the first round, we will not recognize this RSL team that takes the
pitch in a few weeks. What do you make of them really getting rid of most of their attacking players and one of their keepers and this new RSL team that is going to have a ton of new faces coming up in just a few weeks.
Oh, I love it. I mean you're still going to have Diego Luna. I mean, and if he didn't endear himself to this fan base with his performance, was it yesterday against Costa Rica? I mean, that was amazing. If you weren't a fan before, you have to be a fan now playing with it. I guess it's a broken nose. He had surgery, I guess afterwards, but in getting an assist after the injury, it was crazy. So we still have him, We still have justin Glad. I mean, there's
enough familiar faces. I think I loved Mika. I thought he was one of the more dynamic players. I really loved him. I like the idea of the new Australian kid coming in. I don't know. I mean, I there was clearly something off last year. I don't know what it was. I wasn't in the locker room, I wasn't in any meetings. I think it's I'm excited about it, all right.
I guess we'll see.
As Kurt Schmidt has said on the show, I'm either the dumbest guy alive or the smartest guy alive, So we'll have to see kind of everything settles in, all right, Amy, It is a new world of college athletics. And I continue to use the line that on this show I prefer to diagnose and not prognostic aid because trying to predict any of this is really really tough. And we are awaiting a number of different pieces of guidance and legislation to come down that have not come down yet.
But there were some significant news that came.
Down last week from the US Department of Education, and I'll just simplify it. Essentially, classes future revenue distributions from a school to an athlete for his or her nil rights is what's called quote financial assistance, which must be made proportionally available to both male and female athletes are
risk violating Title nine. And the simplest way to explain this is if you're at a school where fifty percent of the athletes are men and fifty percent of the athletes are women, half of the revenue has to go to both and now this could change. We'll get to that in a minute. But what do you make of the ruling that came down last week?
Well, I didn't think I thought it was a negotiation a settlement. Was it like actually a ruling?
This was a memo.
A memo, it's the guidance from the US Department of Education.
So what happened is they I don't know, because there's also been an executive order in the interim that's repealing some of the Title nine guidance that was put into place recently. So it's very confusing. And I didn't like what the NFA did, so they these power conferences is part of a lawsuit antitrust lawsuit. They had, you know, basically negotiated a settlement, but they didn't tell the plaintiffs in the case, the people who were suing, exactly how
it would work. So I don't know that all the administrative code that's going to oversee this has been written. I obviously think that you should make the dollars the same NIL dollars that are available to men should be available to female athletes. The question I have is a lot of these NIL deals are funded by private collectives and they are they subject now to Title nind are
they subject to Department of Education rules? And does the Trump administration rescinding that titleline guidance that was put into place a few months ago, does that change this settlement. I mean, it's just an absolute gray mess right now. I don't think anybody can tell you how it works.
I don't think anybody can tell you how things are funded or you know, if I want to sponsor a player, I have the right to work with the player that I want to sponsor, right So it's they've already talked about how this is kind of a freedom of expression issue, but I don't know how it's going to work. I am really stunned that they came to this agreement without some concrete plan in place of how it will actually work.
Are you just going to guarantee that if a business wants to sponsor a men's team, they also have to sponsor a women's team Like this has always been the issue. This is We've talked about this even when the very first deals came in. This is going to get out of control. And again, I think we can talk about this a couple of weeks ago if you take football out of the equation, it's better. But more women play
college sports than men. So unless you've eliminated some teams to in there at some schools, which has happened, you're going to have women are going to require more than fifty percent of the money in most cases.
So a couple things here.
As we have talked about, the NCAA and the Power Conferences have agreed to allow each school to share up to twenty point five million in direct payments to athletes, that is via name, image and likeness.
So that's going to become a reality. I believe that is July.
And in most cases athletic directors have already come out publicly and said they intend to provide about seventy five percent of that money to the football players.
So back to the whole, like, is this a ruling, is this just a memo?
I mean, ultimately, the Department of Education is in charge of, you know, enforcing Title nine guidelines. So this is them saying this is what we believe you have to do to stay in the space where you're properly handling Title nine, and they are in charge of making sure that this does come down. Trump's nominee to lead the Department of Education is Linda McMahon, who is the estranged wife of WWE founder Vince McMahon. Because nothing is real, So what
are some of the next steps here? Do you believe that once you know, Trump has now been sworn in, he's now the president again, once Linda McMahon takes over the Department of Education, are you aware of what those next steps could be to maybe roll this thing back.
Well, it's not Linda that's going to have to write the you know, the administrative rules. I mean, she'll have to oversee it, is it?
Richly clare?
I hope that we can only hope because, like I said, I do like that nothing's real. But I think the other thing is that they just rescinded that executive order that over basically, the Biden administration had overhauled and created a whole bunch of new guidances for Title NIND and all of those have been rescinded with a new executive order.
And so I don't know if here's the thing, So say the Department the schools try to abide by this agreement right and start writing administrative rules that will would oversee it. If you sus and say they give seventy five percent of the money to football and then the twenty five percent is split between the other sports. And the women find this problem, it's not fair and they want to challenge it. They normally the route they would go to challenge it, their website doesn't exist anymore. So
the EEOC Equal Opportunity whatever whatever that stands for. They're the ones that determine if the rules have been violated. If there is a case there, you cannot sue without permission from them. So I have no idea. I mean, like, if nothing is real, I don't know what's going to happen. But I don't know if they don't abide by these rules, if they don't abide by the settlement, I don't know
who's going to enforce it. Because what normally would happen if you and I agree to a legal settlement and you don't abide by it, is that I would go back to the judge or back to the court, or back to the organization that negotiated is the NCAAA or the Department of Education, say he's not playing by the rules that he agreed to play by. But if that no longer allows you to enforce equity rules that are gender based. How do you enforce it?
Good question and one that I clearly do not have the answer to, or else I probably just would have said it out loud. So you reference the payments that come from booster collectives that are from essentially donors or businesses around the market. So the memo it's not as clear. And again it is a memo. So here's what it says about that. It says the Department does not consider money provided by a third party in an NIL deal
as quote athletic financial assistance. The athletic financial assistance, according to the memo, is what has to be split equally, so for instance, future revenue sharing payments scholarship dollars. But if money from private sources, this is the memo. It's directly from the memo. If money from private sources end up creating a disparity in an athletic program, it is possible that NILE agreements quote quote trigger a school's Title
nine obligations. But your point, if there's no enforcement, is this just all hot air that essentially means nothing.
No, I mean, so say that that happens. So and I can see this happening. So the school is going to put the money where the money where it brings them money, right, so they're going to promote I mean, I just read an ESPN. They just analyzed how the Power five conferences promoted men's and women's sports in a calendar year, and no surprise, they tweeted and you know, talked more about their men's programs than they did their
women's in eighty five percent of the cases. So my issue is if they say, you know, we're just not going to do it, We're just you know, we're not going to do it, and nobody does anything unless they have to. This is really just the way human beings are. The reason these rules have existed is because nobody wanted women to producipay. We didn't care if they got the same amount of money. We didn't care if they got an educational opportunity. The rules are here because they wouldn't
just play nice from the beginning. So now you have these rules they're talking about. You know, if these private investors create inequity, I guarantee you I can tell you that that's how already happening at BUYU. It is already creating an inequity the trips you can take, the scholarships you can offer, the players you can attract are different. For men's women's teams with no mi OL money, with no collectives involved. They're absolutely disproportionately in favor of men. Now,
But who is going to enforce it? Because if I can't, if there's nowhere for me to complain, or if they are no longer rules that can be enforced that allow me to say, Hey, I'm being discriminated on the basis of my gender. What is the basis of my discrimination suit?
Now?
I don't know that there is one, and I don't know. I'm They're shuddering all the DEI offices, all the offices that have anything to do with promoting and helping people make sure they're getting fairness from their educational opportunities and their athletic opportunities. And so I think that in a lot of ways, people are just not even going to know what the options are. They're not even going to know. It's just like working in a building and you know
you're the lowest paid person because you're a woman. But what do you do about it? Because if you go to your boss and say you're not paying me as much as you pay them, he's gonna say, fine, go get a new job. Go get a job somewhere else. Right, Like, the reason the rules are there is because if everyone was fair minded, we wouldn't have these issues in the first place.
All Right, I'm gonna ask the question Amy to set you up that I'm just going to dock shouldn't shouldn't the bulk of the money go to the sports to generate the revenue.
No, because we tax payers. Public money is being used to fund every aspect of those buildings up there. The programs were built on the backs of taxpayers of both genders, and they you use tax money. I mean, I have this beef with all of public investment into money. It has to be there has to be a benefit for everyone. And if you're going to purposely say we're going to just invest in football and not, why am i as?
Why am I? I mean? I know of athletic programs that don't even make money, and they're built on the backs of the students that go there to get an education. They're built on the backs of the community that houses them, that that pays higher property taxes so they can have a system of a higher education nearby and in their in their neighborhood or their town, or their state. Because an educated workforce is a more it is better. It's better for everybody. Better education system raises the level of
everyone's lives. It makes everything better, makes a society much more efficient and innovative and success and just in every way it's better. But I mean, I was just talking to somebody else about this. If you look at the most the lowest studies of like rex sports through professional sports, every study says people who participate in athletics, even at a rec level or just a very you know, non
competitive way, their lives are better. They're healthier, they have lower incidents of suicide, lower incidents of mental health problems, they have lower dropout rates, they have higher grades, they are much more likely to have to go on and get higher education. It's just stunning to me that we're
even contemplating not being as equitable as we should. If you just look at the MCA men and women's basketball situation that happened in twenty twenty one, and what has changed in mended women's basketball college basketball in just through years. I don't see that there is a better anecdotal you know, view of why we should strive for some measure of equality for women.
All right, before I set you loose, I m seed an event last week with a lot of very powerful rich people in the private equity world, and they all are looking as venture capitalists to invest in sports properties. And one of the topics is what you just brought up, and the money that's been invested in women's sports over the past couple of years.
And there's the Caitlin Clark effect.
You know, some of these uh, some of these w NBA teams, their valuations are sky high and a lot of money is going into women's sports. Do you think this uh, this this you know, the momentum that's been created by Caitlin and others, but Caitlin's at a big part of it. Do you think it continues? Are we approaching what some might believe is a bubble?
No? I think it continues, And I would I would argue that Caitlin Clark was made possible by that investigation in twenty twenty one, because what we discovered in twenty twenty one was the NCAA was absolutely strangling women's basketball. They wouldn't let them use March madness. They didn't invest in them separately. They didn't sell their television contract independently. That's why we couldn't do bracket challenges on women's basketball. The list goes on the NCAA. In my if I
hate one thing in my life, it's the NTAA. And they nearly killed women's basketball on their own. They thank God for the social media posts of one athlete that showed the disparity, and everybody was outraged at the reality. I just think people don't know how bad some of the inequities are. I know there are conversations here. You've helped us have these conversations about turning Smith's Ballfield into a place where, you know, a headquarters of women's sports
and community access. That's still I mean, not overwhelmingly won a vote amongst public people, people who live in the city, and yet we're still dragging our feet about it. We're still wondering if it's a good investment. I mean, I don't get it. If we think vegetables are good for boys, why are they not good for girls. If we want to spend a billion dollars making downtown a great place for men's hockey and men's basketball, why can't we make you know thirteen South and Maine a great place for
women's athletics. Why is there the single biggest investment into just women's sports. What a women's sports facility is six million dollars and that's Kansas City's And without Patrick Mahomes and his wife, that doesn't exist. I mean, at some point we have to ask ourselves. You're pouring billions of dollars public money, our money, taxpayer money into facilities for men. When do we spend a few thousand or million on women?
Amy?
I knew you'd be good with this today, so I appreciate your time. Let's get you in the studio soon. Okay, absolutely, all right, maybe Donaldson