At 09:23 PM 4/23/2004 -0400, Joe Dumas wrote:
>http://www.chattanoogan.com/articles/article_49669.asp
>
>Can we, finally, move as a university to eliminate the main cause of
>Athletics deficits and the main problem with Title IX compliance?  The
>students have emphatically said "no new taxes" for sports.  It is time
>for football at UTC to go the way of the dinosaurs before the entire
>Athletics Department goes bankrupt.
>
>If anyone else out there thinks it is time to follow ETSU's lead in
>retiring intercollegiate football in order to concentrate on sports in
>which we can be competitive on a leaner budget, now is the time to let
>Chancellor Stacy and Athletic Director Sloan know how you feel.
>

Well, I'll play devil's advocate and disagree. If we dropped football, we
would (just like ETSU) be booted out of the Southern Conference, which
would have a negative impact on ALL OTHER sports and the student athletes
that participate in those other sports. The only other conference that
would take ETSU is the Atlantic Sun conference, which is where UTC would
have to try to join as well. That conference has teams such as Mercer,
Gardner-Webb, Campbell, and others. The better teams in that conference are
leaving (Georgia State, Central Florida, Florida Atlantic), which will
likely cost the Atlantic Sun their automatic NCAA basketball tournament
bid. Ask coaches Wes Moore and John Shulman how much fun it would be to
recruit student-athletes to a team in a conference that can't earn a bid to
the NCAA tournament. Wouldn't it have been great for the Lady Mocs to have
gone 29-3, and have to hope for an at-large bid from the NCAA tournament
committee?  There is already grumbling among some ETSU basketball players
that they will leave if the A-Sun loses their automatic NCAA bid. With ETSU
leaving the Southern Conference, there aren't many rivals left for the Mocs
to play and I'd love to see us move to the Ohio Valley Conference. The
travel would be much less, but they'd have no interest in UTC without
football.

What does this have to do with the mission of our university? Not much I
guess, but since I am a UTC graduate and an employee, I take pride in our
athletic teams, and I didn't want it to appear that everyone that works
here is in favor of dropping football.  I actually went to football and
basketball games when I was a student, and I still do.


Jonathan Looney
Director - Student Financial Aid
University of Tennessee at Chattanooga