Georgia State University, where 61% of the students are female (college officials agree that passing 60% is the threshhold you don’t want to experience … see this commentary I wrote about James Madison University as one example) has decided one solution is to launch a football team. See this editorial running in today’s USA Today (full disclosure: I wrote it).

A paucity of men isn’t the only reason for launching a football team there. See the opposing view written by Carl Patton, the university president. He doesn’t even mention the gender imbalance, but other university officials were not so shy.

I”m not the first to write about colleges starting football teams to attract men. The New York Times wrote this two years ago. At small colleges, launching football teams works pretty well — just the number of players is enough to rebalance gender gaps a bit.

 With 28,000 students, however, Georgia State is no small college. University presidents justify the revenue-draining teams in several ways employing logic that varies in soundness (see editorial). But here’s the thing about the attracting-men rationale: Georgia State may steal some college-going men from a similar university lacking big time sports, but launching a football doesn’t boost the size of the college-aspiring pool of guys coming out of high school. That’s a problem arising from the K-12 years.

As far as the boy troubles are concerned, that makes college football a zero-sum game.

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