Let’s give a shout out to the Broncos’ Men’s Tennis Team for making it into the NCAA Tournament:
Notably, USD (ranked #15) is hosting 1st/2nd round matches this weekend. Pepperdine is in the tourney as well, along with WCC newcomer Denver.
Our boys will face Auburn on the Baylor campus.
I’ll throw a few trivia questions out there for fun:
NO CHEATING
Two current WCC teams have won the Men’s Tennis NCAA D1 Championship. One in 1949, the other in 2006. Can you name them?
From 2015 through 2025, there have been 10 NCAA championships (2020 was canceled because of COVID). One school has won 5 of those 10. Can you name it?
Three schools have, collectively, won the majority of the 79 NCAA Championships. One has won 21 times, the second has won 17, and the third has won 15. Two of those schools were co-champions one year (1976). Can you guess who the three teams are? Bonus points if you match the teams to the number of championships.
Speaking of tennis, I just saw this news from the Billikens:
First question…Pepperdine in 2006 (feeling good about that pick). USF in 1949?
Q#2…Going with Stanford. Note: They have gone 50 consecutive years winning at least one NCAA championship.
Q#3…Dragons. Nightman and Milksteak. Or Auburn, Oklahoma and Stanford.
Well done on Q1: you nailed both of them, both schools and years.
Q2: Shockingly, Virginia! In fact, they’ve won 6 out of the last 12.
Q3: USC 21 titles; Stanford 17 titles; UCLA 15 titles. In 1976, USC and UCLA shared the title. Apparently there were no tie-breakers back then!
USF dropped tennis a season or two ago.
Arkansas just announced they are dropping tennis.
Seems like a pretty inconsequential line item to keep on terms of cost and roster, though I can see where devoting the physical space for that many courts could be significant, for an urban campus. I think USF played at Cal and Olympic Clubs due to the lack of on campus courts.
Great work Broncos 
I’m waiting to see if SMC drops their newly-announced aquatics program now that their longshot P12 audition is dead. Sign of the times. NIL is going to really chip away at non-revenue sports and, as Geno Auriemma alluded, has already killed Title IX.
I’m curious…how has NIL killed Title IX?
Huge disparities between what money is available to male athletes versus female athletes, compounded with pressure on schools to divert money away from women’s sports toward basketball/football. I am fairly certain that schools are not equally allocating revenue share under the new model which would seem to be a direct Title IX issue, but the current federal administration does not seem keen on that interpretation or enforcement.
There are a few exceptions that prove the rule, but for every Livvy Dunne (who wasn’t really making money for gymnastics) and Caitlin Clark, there are probably 100 female athletes that are receiving less from their respective schools than they were 5 years ago.
Maybe I’m wrong about all of that–there’s no systematic data of which I’m aware–but as long as NIL/revenue share is pay-to-play, it’s going to be subject to the market forces around relative profitability of NCAA sports that Title IX was meant to neutralize.
They specifically added that program to attract tuition-paying student-athletes to help with their enrollment challenges.
I thought Title IX was about equitable number of scholarships for women’s sports. As I recall, it was one of the major contributors to the decision by SCU to axe the football program.
Also, not sure how NIL itself would violate Title IX, as those are, or at least intended to be, arrangements between marketers and players. I can see how player salaries might be interpreted as violations of Title IX, but that might be a stretch. Though I am not a lawyer.
I can understand the disparity in NIL allocation for a school’s various sports programs. At the end day, which programs “pay the bill”?
Quite simply, it’s football, followed by a distant second with men’s basketball.
Sorry, I meant more the “spirit of Title IX” than actual legal violations. I think NIL is outside the ambit of Title IX so long as it isn’t directly negotiated by the schools (though I’m sure the system is rife with collusion). Revenue sharing seems much more dicey since the schools are directly involved.
Schools are under pressure to cut everywhere in the athletic department that isn’t football or men’s basketball. That will mean women’s sports and benefits (facilities, travel, etc) that go to women’s sports.
It’s less about women’s athletes making less in NIL than male counterparts–though that’s not totally exempt from concern. It’s more about remaking whole athletic departments around football/basketball and using creative accounting to get to that result, which will, I believe, over time reduce teams and scholarship spots for women (and male athletes on non-revenue teams).
Ultimately, I think the whole debate around college sports right now rests somewhat on whether you see college athletics as a business or a student activity. Certainly it has always been some of both. But some sports are solidly a business (football, MBB), a couple are in-between (high major WBB, maybe soccer and baseball), and others are totally a student activity (water polo, etc.) Your starting paradigm determines the outcome you want. Title IX comes very much from the “student activity” mindset with an acknowledgement that if the government didn’t mandate it, the business side would take over and funnel all resources to the revenue-generating sports. That was a fragile structure and maybe fictional in a lot of cases. But absent reform, I don’t see it holding, as schools will start from the perceived need to have $20.5 million a year (or as close to it as possible) to spend on athlete salaries and find cuts to get there. We know where those cuts will come from.
https://x.com/mitchgilfillan/status/2049169239290847513?s=20
Looks like tennis is getting the axe at several schools