Girls! Have we got a deal for you here at the University of Colorado at Boulder!
For just $50 you can have TWO WHOLE HOURS in the sumptuous Dal Ward Varsity Room with snacks and soft drinks, hosted by none other than head football coach Dan Hawkins.
The coach will teach a course titled “Football 101 for Women” so you can be the best doggone little fan in the NCAA this fall when our heroes take the field.
“The event should be exciting, entertaining and very informative for the females,” Hawkins said in the press release announcing the class.
And he promises that even if you don’t want to worry your pretty little head with all those complicated X’s and O’s and wonder why the team spends so much time standing around and so little playing, you’ll still get your VERY OWN CU clipboard and T-shirt just for attending …
Leave it to the athletics department (Motto: All calls to escort services on university phones are strictly for personal use) to think that CU women need a remedial program in watching football.
“It’s a basic elementary synopsis of the game,” said Prema Khanna, director of marketing for the athletics department, who noted that, well, yes, men will be admitted to “Football 101 for Women,” if they really want to come.
“Though the program is geared toward women, we won’t turn anyone away,” she said.
And what is it that the coach thinks women need to learn?
“Coach Hawkins will be talking about offense, defense, special teams and equipment,” Khanna said. He’ll explain what the players wear, who does what on the field and how the school goes about recruiting the players – just in case the students have been living on another planet during the football recruiting scandals of the past few years.
Khanna said the class is “a way for the football program to reach out for another demographic,” namely women who’ve managed to survive to adulthood without football.
Remarkably, CU is hyping the weekly football-tailgating-party hardy blowouts at the same time that many universities are trying to address the problem of male students who may be – how can I say it delicately – intoxicated by the game and the whole culture surrounding it at the expense of, um, school.
Statistics from the Department of Education reveal that men increasingly are in the minority in college admissions.
Only 42 percent of college students nationwide are men, and of those who are admitted to colleges and universities, the figures show that on average they get lower grades, come away with fewer degrees and receive fewer honors than women.
The reasons for their poor performance are varied, but the 2005 National Survey of Student Engagement suggests one big one is that the guys goof off a lot more. On average, the men reported spending 11 more hours per week relaxing and socializing than female students.
The UCLA Higher Education Research Institute supports these findings, reporting that of 17,000 students surveyed at 204 colleges and universities, men were found to be more likely to cut class and not do homework – with the resulting poor outcomes pretty much guaranteed.
While men still dominate in admission to CU – the ratio of freshman admissions in 2005 was 53 percent men to 47 percent women – the national trends hold when it comes to achievement.
Among the freshmen entering CU in 1999, 31 percent of the men and 45 percent of the women graduated in four years. And in the past two years, 10 percent of the men have received undergraduate honors compared with 15 percent of the women.
It’s hardly a crisis. Boys just wanna have fun and all that.
Nah, the real crisis at CU is the $8 million deficit the football program is running after paying off $4 million in coaches contracts and absorbing the losses from sagging ticket sales.
So girls, forget about the library. Your homework can wait. This is important!
The football program needs YOU.
Diane Carman’s column appears Sunday, Tuesday and Thursday. She can be reached at 303-820-1489 or dcarman@denverpost.com.
