Wrestling at all levels, but particularly at the college and high school levels, took a huge hit on Tuesday when Arizona State cut its storied program, along with men’s tennis and swimming.

It’s a huge development even here, some 400 miles away, because it shrinks further the pool of quality schools for high school wrestlers to move on to and it takes a rival away, and a relatively inexpensive road opponent, away from Cal State Bakersfield — one of now eight remaining wrestling schools in the Pac-10 conference. The cuts come on the heels of recent cuts of wrestling programs by Oregon and Fresno State.

And lastly it further illustrates what an easy target wrestling and other minor men's sports are,  and the poor choices administrators make in relation to Title IX and its role in balancing collegiate athletic departments. This move could and likely will perpetuate more bad decisions by administrators to cut men’s sports under the guise of budget problems, while the real motivating factor is Title IX legislation, bogus interpretation of it and fear of lawsuits slapped on them by women's groups or female athletes.

ASU administrators say that trimming men’s wrestling, tennis and swimming will save the university $1.2 million and will help the university approach proper gender equity proportions, but mostly they’re blaming the casualties on budget dilemmas brought on by state funding cuts. Two other criteria were given for the cuts: each sport's potential for competitive success and conference/regional support. Gender equity, by the way, was the fourth criteria offered, implying that it was the least important of the four.

Who’s kidding who here? If money was the primary issue, why not include a women’s sport in the cuts — a non-revenue sport like water polo, which was spending, by the way, $6,374 per each of its 22 athletes during the 2006-2007 school year, compared to wrestling spending $3,056 per each of the 44 on the wrestling roster, according to data from the Office of Postsecondary Education. Moreover, there are more than 5,000 kids wrestling at the high school level in Arizona and zero playing sanctioned water polo, so don’t tell me there would be negligent denying of opportunity if water polo were to fall by the wayside. Title IX is supposed to guard against that. It doesn’t call for the irresponsible cutting of men’s sports so as to even up opportunity for women.

Potential for competitive success? ASU won a national title in 1988 and annually is a national contender, although not this past year.

There are steps the university could have taken to avoid these damaging cuts. First, state monies don’t fund scholarships, so it’s unfair to lump them in with the savings if you’re going to blame the program cuts on state budget cuts. A ramp up in fund raising campaign, combined with trim-downs of men’s rosters and expenditures and additions to some women’s rosters and expenditures could have made up some of the losses, kept wrestling, swimming and tennis intact, and balanced the numbers. And while football goes a long way toward funding the entire athletic program, providing 85 scholarships and paying coaches three and four times the average of all the other sports, minus basketball, throws gender equity out of whack.

 Until the true spirit of Title IX legislation is fully implemented in addition to administrators toeing the line on football and basketball coaching salaries and number of football scholarships granted, we’re going to continue to see knee-jerk cuts to storied programs like ASU wrestling.