For those of you that are arguing that the revenue generated by the tournament should determine the quality of treatment of the athletes based on sex, I would state that you are wrong. That argument presupposes the college athletics exists in a vacuum of only the tournament. The truth is that while athletics are outside of mainstream academics, they only exist because the colleges exist as academics institutions.
Today, more than 50% of college students are women and more than 50% of the degrees at most schools are granted to women. These women are paying tuition that pays the professors, and keep universities alive. While you might argue that donors who support male teams are helping althetics, it is irrelevant because of title 9. Universities are bound to treat women fairly and equally. The NCAA gets around this because they are not bound by title 9. While that might be a legal argument, it’s certainly not an ethical one. Since women attend universities, pay tuition and are in fact part of the very life blood of these schools, they deserve no less than equal treatment at every level. Anyone who argues otherwise is saying that male students should get an inferior education, live in inferior housing and get worse text books because women make up greater than 50% of the tuition flow into the schools.
Since, of course that is silly, I would argue that schools must treat as a whole of all of their programs and that includes both academics and sports. Regardless of where the contributions of each sex are coming from, you must treat all students equally at all times.