Tackling the Attendance Problem : Big West: With Division I-A status in jeopardy, conference athletic directors will meet to discuss ways to upgrade football programs.

Big West Conference athletic directors will meet in Las Vegas Sunday and Monday to discuss ways conference schools can upgrade their football programs.

“The perception of Big West football needs to be improved--no question about it,” said Dennis Farrell, associate conference commissioner. “No miracle cures are expected out of this meeting, but we’re looking to do something to get the ball rolling in the right direction.”

The conference’s major concern, Farrell said, is with sagging attendance at member schools, a problem that has jeopardized the conference’s Division I-A membership.

To maintain I-A status, five of the conference’s eight teams must have averaged either 20,000 fans for all games or 17,000 fans for home games once in the previous four seasons. Individual schools can qualify for Division 1-A status by fulfilling the same criteria.

“We’ve been on the bubble a couple of times,” Farrell said. “We want all of our schools to qualify for 1-A membership instead of making it by the skin of our teeth every year.”

Farrell said the first step in improving attendance could be to cut the number of conference games required of each school. Presently, teams play a full round-robin schedule in which each school plays seven conference opponents a season.

Farrell said if there is one visible decision made during this weekend’s meetings, it will be to reduce the number of conference games so that schools can schedule more attractive nonconference opponents, either big-name schools or teams that are natural rivals, and possibly increase attendance.

“We’re looking at requiring from three conference games a year up to the current seven,” Farrell said. “There’s no consensus on the number of games, but there’s a big push (among athletic directors) to reduce the requirement.”

There has also been talk of the conference attempting to gain admittance to the College Football Assn., a consortium of 64 of the nation’s major college football-playing universities whose primary purpose is to negotiate television contracts for its member schools.

But that’s pretty much a pipe dream for now. Only one conference school, Fresno State, even comes close to meeting CFA membership criteria, which includes averaging 20,000 in paid attendance for three consecutive years.

Last season, Cal State Fullerton averaged 3,766 spectators for four home games and 14,375 for seven road games. The Titans and Long Beach State have had the lowest attendance figures in the conference in recent years.

At least five schools would have to meet CFA criteria for the entire conference to gain admittance.

“The prevailing mood now is we don’t know what the future of the CFA is, let alone where we fit into it,” Farrell said.

Notre Dame’s recent decision to secede from the CFA and negotiate its own TV contract with NBC, talk of the Southeastern Conference expanding and wanting to negotiate its own TV deals, and talk of the Southwest Conference and Big Eight possibly merging for TV purposes has put the CFA’s future in doubt.

“I’m not sure the CFA five years from now will be a viable entity,” Farrell said. “And because of that, I’m not sure our schools are so interested in doing whatever it takes to get CFA membership.”

A more realistic possibility is conference expansion--San Diego State, a CFA member, and Cal State Northridge have expressed interest in joining the Big West--or a conference realignment that would benefit the Big West in terms of football.

“You don’t have to be a geography expert to look at a map and realize some schools could cut costs by realigning,” Cal State Fullerton Athletic Director Ed Carroll said. “I think the Big West is more appealing than it used to be because it wants to upgrade football.”