Football coach-turned-senator’s playbook for saving women’s sports

Between transgender-identifying men competing in women’s sports and women’s limited athletics funding coming from so-called Name, Image, and Likeness policies, Sen. Tommy Tuberville says, there will be no women’s sports left in five years unless something is done.

Tuberville, R-Ala., a former Auburn University football coach, met with President-elect Donald Trump’s pick for secretary of education, Linda McMahon, on Monday.

Afterward, Tuberville said McMahon is “totally against” men competing in women’s sports. The two discussed protecting Title IX, the 1972 federal law prohibiting sex-based discrimination in federally funded education programs.

“The Biden administration basically said … if you don’t allow transgender sports, men in women’s sports, then you lose your federal funding,” Tuberville told The Daily Signal, referring to the administration’s reinterpretation of Title IX to allow males who identify as girls and women in female spaces.

“We need to get that out,” he said. “That doesn’t need to be in there. We don’t need men participating against women.”

Tuberville and McMahon discussed ensuring that Title IX is funded, since Name, Image, and Likeness, or NIL, policies threaten women’s athletic scholarships. NIL allows athletes to make money through endorsement deals and sponsorships.

“Title IX has been the best thing to ever happen up here, and it gives young girls an opportunity to look up and ‘Hey, listen, I can be a scholarship player. I go to Olympics, and I do all these things,’” he said. “But now, because of the transgender movement, and the NIL is going to defund all that, and so there’s going to be a lot of opportunities lost.”

Because men’s sports are usually more popular, male athletes can often secure high-paying NIL deals. That could cause universities to rely less on scholarship funding for athletes.

Title IX requires schools to give equal athletic scholarships to men and women. If men received fewer scholarships due to being paid through NIL deals, there would be fewer scholarships for women, who might be less likely to have NIL deals.

“What’s happening is, a lot of the women’s sports, the nonrevenue sports—swimming, golf, and all those where you don’t pay money to get in to watch—they don’t make money,” Tuberville said. “And so what we want to do is make sure that a lot of the money that goes to NIL also goes to nonrevenue sports, to where we can still have those.”

“If we stay on this path, in five years, you won’t have women’s sports,” the Alabama lawmaker said. “It’s going to be gone. You’ll have club sports, but they’ll have to pay their own fees to play the sport, and that’s not right.”

[Editor’s note: This story originally was published by The Daily Signal.]