On a Tuesday morning in March 2023, University of Minnesota sophomore wrestler Dane Norgren got a text from his coach asking him to come by the athletics office. He assumed it was a recruiting conversation. It wasn’t. The program had reviewed its gender equity numbers after a round of portal-funded football scholarship expansions, and men’s wrestling was the math that didn’t work anymore. Norgren had 48 hours to decide whether to graduate transfer or lose his aid package entirely. Nineteen other wrestlers got the same call that week.
That story is playing out at programs across the country right now. The names change. The sport changes. The math stays the same.
The Number That Should Scare Every Athletic Director in America
Here is what the numbers tell us: according to the NCAA’s 2023 Gender Equity Report, schools in the Power Five conferences increased their transfer portal scholarship spending by an average of 31% between 2021 and 2023. Over that same window, 47 non-revenue men’s programs were eliminated or suspended nationally, and 23 women’s programs faced review for under-investment relative to new spending baselines.
Nobody is talking about this, but they should be.
Title IX does not care about the portal. The law has one core requirement: athletic opportunities and scholarship dollars must be proportional to the male-female enrollment split of the institution. When a football program drops $4 million into portal recruiting in a single cycle, the compliance office has to respond. Either women’s programs get a matching investment, or something else gets cut.
The stat that changes everything: a 2024 analysis by the Drake Group found that 61% of Division I schools were already operating near the outer edge of Title IX proportionality before the House v. NCAA settlement added revenue-sharing to the equation. One aggressive portal cycle can push a school from “marginal compliance” to “active exposure” overnight.
Has your school’s football program added more than 15 portal transfers in the last two recruiting cycles? If the answer is yes, someone in the compliance office is running numbers on which sports are most expendable.
How the Portal Broke an Already Fragile System
To understand why this matters, you need to go back to 1992.
That year, the Office for Civil Rights issued its first major Title IX compliance framework for athletics. The three-part test it established has governed gender equity ever since: schools must either match enrollment proportionality, demonstrate a history of expanding women’s opportunities, or fully accommodate the interests of the underrepresented sex.
For 30 years, most schools threaded the needle with a combination of roster management and careful scholarship allocation. It wasn’t elegant, but it worked.
Then came the portal. Then came NIL. Then came House v. NCAA.
The 2024 House v. NCAA settlement opened the door for schools to share up to $20.5 million annually in direct revenue with athletes, starting in the 2025-26 academic year. The distributions were initially weighted heavily toward football and men’s basketball rosters.
Translation: the free money era just got a lot more complicated.
The compliance gap between what schools are paying and what Title IX requires is widening every semester.
Schools that pour disproportionate revenue-sharing dollars into football without adjusting women’s program budgets upward are building a legal case against themselves. The Office for Civil Rights does not wait for a lawsuit to open an investigation. A single complaint from a current or former athlete can trigger a full institutional audit.
The Programs Being Squeezed From Both Sides
Did You Know: Wrestling, men’s swimming, men’s gymnastics, and men’s tennis have collectively lost more than 200 programs since 1981, according to NCAA participation data. The portal era is accelerating that trend, not creating it.
Non-revenue men’s sports have always been the pressure valve in the Title IX equation. When football rosters expand, wrestling disappears. When portal spending spikes, men’s golf gets a review committee. This isn’t new. What’s new is the speed.
At the same time, women’s programs that were added purely for proportionality compliance are now being asked to absorb portal-era budget pressure from the other direction. Schools that added women’s beach volleyball or rowing in the 2010s to hit their numbers are now discovering those sports need real investment to stay compliant under new spending baselines.
Do you know what percentage of your school’s athletic scholarships currently go to women’s sports? That number is publicly available, and in many cases, it’s moving in the wrong direction.
The Drake Group’s 2024 analysis of portal-era equity spending shows that mid-major schools face a uniquely brutal squeeze: they can’t match blue blood portal spending, but they still carry the same Title IX proportionality requirement. The result is schools cutting both men’s non-revenue sports and adding paper-thin women’s programs simultaneously, trying to keep the ratios from collapsing.
Warning: If your school’s athletic department issued a “program review” press release in the last 18 months, do not assume it’s about performance. Cross-reference it with the athletics budget reporting cycle. In most cases, it’s a compliance exercise dressed up in administrative language.
The South Carolina and Oregon Effect
The schools that are navigating this best are doing something that looks obvious in retrospect but required serious institutional will to execute.
South Carolina’s women’s basketball program doesn’t just generate revenue for itself. According to a 2023 Sports Business Journal analysis, the Gamecocks’ women’s program has become a compliance asset, generating ticket revenue, NIL attention, and enrollment-side interest that gives the athletic department breathing room to justify higher women’s program spending across the board. The success of one elite women’s program creates a halo effect that protects other women’s sports from the squeeze.
Oregon, on the other side of the model, has leaned into portal spending for both men’s and women’s revenue programs simultaneously, using NIL infrastructure built around the Phil Knight funding network to raise women’s program budgets in parallel with football expansion.
Neither model is replicable for a Mid-American Conference school operating on a $30 million total athletics budget. That’s the uncomfortable truth. What works at Oregon doesn’t scale to Akron.
Pro Tip: If you follow a smaller program closely, watch the women’s rowing and beach volleyball roster announcements. Schools add those sports almost exclusively for Title IX compliance math, not competitive vision. A new women’s sport announcement paired with a “program review” on the men’s side is the clearest signal a compliance adjustment is in progress.
What the Next 18 Months Actually Look Like
The House settlement’s revenue-sharing provisions go live in 2025-26. Schools are already structuring their distributions. The compliance officers who have been quietly warning athletic directors about proportionality exposure for the last three years are now getting seats at the table, because the dollar amounts involved make the legal exposure impossible to ignore.
Prediction: at least 30 additional non-revenue men’s programs will be eliminated at the Division I level by the end of 2026, concentrated at mid-major schools attempting to manage portal spending alongside Title IX compliance. Women’s programs at those same schools will see nominal budget increases that don’t keep pace with the new spending baselines created by revenue-sharing, leaving them technically compliant but resource-thin.
The schools that survive this without catastrophic cuts share one characteristic: they started their compliance planning two years before they needed it. The ones bleeding out right now started their planning the week the OCR letter arrived.
Do you know whether your school has a standing Title IX athletics review, or whether compliance gets checked only when there’s a complaint?
Action Step: Pull your school’s most recent EADA filing at ope.ed.gov. Look at the scholarship dollar column for men’s and women’s programs side by side. Then look at it again for the two years prior. If the gap is widening toward men’s programs, you are watching a compliance problem build in real time, not in retrospect.
Your Next 3 Steps
Step 1: Go to ope.ed.gov and pull your school’s Equity in Athletics Disclosure Act filing for the last three years. Compare football scholarship spend to total women’s program scholarship spend, year over year. You don’t need a law degree to see a trend. If the men’s number is growing faster than the women’s number, that school is accumulating legal exposure with every portal cycle. Look at the actual dollar columns, not the summary ratios.
Step 2: Search your school’s athletics department press releases for any “program review,” “competitive assessment,” or “strategic restructuring” language in the last 18 months. These releases are public records. Cross-reference any program named in those releases with the school’s EADA scholarship data. If a men’s non-revenue sport appears in a review announcement and the football scholarship line grew by more than 10% in the prior filing year, the connection is almost certainly compliance-driven, not performance-driven. Athletic departments rarely say that plainly. The numbers will.
Step 3: Set a Google Alert for “[Your School Name] Title IX complaint” and a second one for “[Your School Name] OCR investigation.” Office for Civil Rights investigations are public once they open, but mainstream sports media rarely covers them until they escalate into settlements or lawsuits. Getting ahead of that coverage cycle means you’ll understand what’s actually happening to a program before the athletic department’s official statement shapes the narrative. Think of it as the insider knowledge that fans who only follow the beat reporters will never have.
The portal era changed recruiting. House v. NCAA is changing money. Title IX compliance is the third force that most fans haven’t factored in yet. The programs that survive the next five years intact will be the ones whose fan bases understood all three forces at once, and pushed for accountability before the cuts were already made.
