Jonathan Looney wrote:
> Well, I'm NOT with you, so I'll throw in a dissenting voice. It's after 5
> p.m., so I'm doing this as an alumni of the university and a fan of the
> Mocs athletics teams, not as an employee. ;-)
It's after the end of the Spring semester and before the start of school
in the Fall, so I'm doing the same thing :)
> The decision to scrap football at ETSU is not viewed by many in
> the community as the rosy picture that the ETSU administration has painted.
> And now that they've been forced to the Atlantic Sun Conference (the
> absolute worst conference in all of Division I), they are finding out about
> the realities of travel costs which are estimated to triple due to the
> location of many of the A-Sun institutions (Florida).
There are other conferences out there. Or, why not form a non-football
conference with UTC and other schools that have, or would be willing to,
drop football? We could have a "Tennessee Conference" with Martin,
ETSU, MTSU, Tenn. Tech, Tenn. State, Austin Peay, Memphis, ... pretty
much everyone except UTK. (As bad as Vanderbilt's football team is,
they might want to join, too :) If it needs to be bigger, bring in UAH,
some of the smaller schools in Georgia, North Carolina, Kentucky, etc.
It's time to stop accepting the premise that the only choices are the
SoCon or the Atlantic Sun, and start thinking outside the box.
> "There is no Division I-AA football program that is self-sufficient."
Right. Or ever will be. So given budget realities, we need to get out
of Division I-AA. We theoretically could do that by moving up to I-A,
but practically there is no chance that that would not result in even
bigger monetary losses. The only realistic options are to eliminate
football or drop to Division III (non-scholarship division) sports.
A small step in the right direction would be to eliminate football
scholarships and play Division I-AA non-scholarship football as some
schools do. I don't see how a lack of athletic scholarships in Division
I-AA, or III, could do much to further degrade the won-lost record of
the team....
> Larimore, debunked myths about college athletic programs such as graduation
> rates, which are 13 percent higher across the board for college athletes.
Sure, if you include sports like tennis, cross-country, rowing, golf,
etc. Anybody have the graduation percentages handy for football? Just
curious.
> Raising the hair of some academics, Larimore pointed out that most of a
> university’s publicity and recognition are based upon the success of its
> athletics programs not its academic standing.
Tell Stanford that. Or Emory. Or Vanderbilt, the classic example of a
great academic institution with a lousy football team. Of course, being
a private school they can afford theirs.
> "Athletes don’t have the opportunity to play at the next level and stay
> around home," said Stubbs.
Guess what ... most high school athletes don't have the opportunity to
play at the college level, locally or not, because they just aren't good
enough. (A lot of us, yours truly included, weren't even good enough to
play varsity sports in high school.) That's too bad, but it's life.
That is what intramural/recreational sports are for....
> Southeast Louisiana is the only program to bring back football, which they
> did last season, after a 20-year layoff.
Only one has brought it back ... how many have *dropped* football?
Seems like Jonathan's article is making my point for me. And that one
school he mentions, ...
> Its program is privately funded.
Well, heck, if you can generate enough private funding to keep UTC's
football team, go for it. But that is not the context of the debate on
our campus. We are talking about adding a $50 per semester fee when
students are already paying an average of $165 per year to support
athletics, the lion's share of which goes to football. Our expensive
football team is *not* privately funded. It needs to be, or it needs to go.
> If we cancelled football at UTC, in addition to the damage it would cause
> our other athletic teams by being dragged into a pathetic conference like
> the Atlantic Sun,
... there are alternatives, such as forming a new conference ...
Besides, if the real value of athletics for the athletes is the
competition itself, what does it matter if they play in the SoCon, the
Atlantic Sun, or the UTC Intramural League? Unless you are a
professional athlete, participating -- at any level -- should be its own
reward.
> ... I'd have to watch that branch campus of ours up the road
> in Knoxville play football games on Saturday. Oh, the horror.......
Well, you can always root against them. I do, unless they are playing
Ole Miss or Florida....
Laura Mincy wrote:
> ... we performed an extensive audit of our
> compliance with Title IX. We found eleven critical areas in which we
> needed to make vast improvements in order to get into Compliance. From the
> eleven areas, we formulated a 5-year Gender Equity Plan which consisted of
> 20 items to fix.... We were able to correct eleven of the 20 items
> with policy implementation or from taking things away from the male
> sports. However, the remaining nine items required a substantial financial
> commitment to correct.
Which could easily be covered, without a fee increase, by scrapping
football.
> For several years, I have been telling any University group and officials
> who will listen that we are putting the University in jeopardy for not
> being able to fulfill our Gender Equity Plan. Compliance with Title IX is
> a University control area, not just an Athletic Department problem. And
> guess what, if you get a complaint lodged against you, you cannot tell the
> Office of Civil Rights that "we can't afford to fix our problems"--that
> will not fly.
Fix it today by eliminating the biggest expenditure on men's sports,
namely football. Voila, instant Title IX compliance.
> I am proud that Athletics Director Steve Sloan, Interim Chancellor Obear,
> Chancellor Brown, and the Board of Trustees recognized that while
> unpopular, instituting the Athletics Fee was the right thing to do to help
> us fulfill the Gender Equity Plan.
Eliminating football would have been vastly more popular among faculty
and staff (I did a survey a while back; has the athletics department
dared to try to replicate or refute it?) and probably among students as
well, given their overwhelming rejection of such a fee just a year ago.
*THAT* would have been the right thing to do.
> I am preparing a detailed report that
> will also go our the GoMocs web site that will show how the plan will be
> fulfilled using the funds generated by the Athletics Fee by 2008 as
> previously stated to the NCAA and the world back in 2003.
Why wait until 2008? I know it's too late to back out for this fall,
but we could make 2005 the last season for football at UTC and be in
compliance by 2006. Some ideas just make too much sense to be
implemented, I guess.
Janet Secrest wrote:
> I did object to blaming the fee increase on women's sports and Title IX.
Convenient scapegoat, but it just doesn't fly if you look at the
situation logically. Where is the money going? Football. Where is the
only place cuts could be made to fix the problems? Football.
"Gender equity" is just a diversion to try to draw attention away from
the real problem, which is that we spend far too much on one men's sport
with a perennially losing record. You can either extract a bunch more
money from the students and say you are going to spend it on women's
sports, or you can save money by making painful but necessary cuts.
As in the case of politicians, you can pretty much figure which of those
approaches best suits our athletics department....
> The argument could be framed from many other points of view,
And has, but no one in the Athletics Department is listening. I hope
our new Chancellor is! Like Obi-Wan Kenobi, he may be "... our only hope."
> but it always seems to come down to those pesky women wanting to horn in on sports.
Right. Of course, the men in the "minor" sports always get shafted,
too. Worse, in fact, because their sports are outright eliminated, or
never started in the first place (among other things, football is why we
have a softball team but no baseball team).
> And why give students the impression they had a say-so by giving them the opportunity to vote when it was not something they had a choice in? It seems that it should have been clear that it was only an opinion survey.
That, to me, is the biggest travesty of all. We gave the students the
opportunity to vote a year ago -- they rejected the athletics fee
soundly -- and now we turn around and ignore their clear mandate. I
suspect some of them will start to vote with their feet if nothing is
done, since voting in the literal sense got them nowhere. If enrollment
goes down for the fall, you know where to look....
--
"It does not require a majority to prevail, but rather an irate,
tireless minority keen to set brush fires in people's minds...."
-- Samuel Adams
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