College Football and Rape

MoJo has a sobering list of rapes and other sexual assaults (and some allegations) here.

WTF is going on?

Of course it's consistent with this list that college football players are no more prone to this sort of thing than the non-football-playing population of college males...though that would be even worse... I also don't know how many football players there are in D-IA (looks like the list is limited to major programs...), so there's no easy way to identify percentages here...and that's important information. (Though it's gut-wrenching to think of trying to put such acts "in perspective" with percentages, still, we'd need to know them to know whether this is something specific to football.)

This catches my eye in part because my own institution is thinking of moving to D-IA (or FBS, as I guess it's not called...I'm not a football fan...). This is probably a bad move financially, of course. College sports is a money-losing proposition for almost everyone. Unless you're up in the stratosphere near the Carolinas (in hoops) or Michigan (in football), you're losing money. But there are, of course, many other considerations that. Should an institution choose to support an activity that generates so many brain injuries, for example? If there's some link between football and assault, that'd, of course, matter a lot... One the one hand, you might think that football promotes aggression... On the other hand, such intuitive hypotheses are often (usually?) false. On the other other hand, it isn't at all clear that we should expect football to be that much worse than other sports...nor for DI-A status to make much difference as compared to DI-AA...

Well, that's all just babbling. I have nothing cogent to add to the MoJo piece.