BROTHERS IN ARMS : Buffalo Plans to Follow in CSUN’s Path Next Year in an Effort to Boost its Prestige

Whatever its record, the State University of New York, Buffalo, will be in the top 20. Nelson Townsend, the school’s athletic director, is sure of it.

No, not in basketball. Not in baseball, either. Not in athletics, period. In a word, academics.

Buffalo happens to be one of the nation’s top universities in research. Unfortunately, such a distinction does little to swell the pride of the more than 28,000 students who attend the school.

“We are prominent academically,” Townsend said during an interview in his office a few months ago, “but there is a lack of excitement and involvement within the institution.”

Athletics, school officials believe, is partly to blame. “We are playing institutions at the Division III and Division II levels that none of our students can relate to,” Townsend said. “We play some institutions that some people have never heard of, including myself.”

In a year, that will change. As of Sept. 1, 1991, Buffalo is scheduled to begin competing at the National Collegiate Athletic Assn. Division I level in all sports but football. Buffalo and Cal State Northridge are among six schools set to join the major college ranks in the next two years, according to the NCAA. The others are Wisconsin-Milwaukee and Northeastern Illinois, both of which will make the move from Division II this year, and Southeast Missouri State and Cal State Sacramento, which will advance in the fall of 1991.

Like their Northridge counterparts, Buffalo administrators have chosen Division I athletics as a means to boost their school’s image and increase student involvement. And if some extra money might come of it, well, that’s fine too.

Although they are 3,000 miles apart, the schools have similarities in addition to their reasons for the move and their broad-based athletic programs.

Northridge’s enrollment this school year is expected to exceed 31,000, a number Buffalo is fast approaching. Both are commuter schools located in urban settings. Therefore, they have plenty of competition when it comes to attracting a sports fan’s dollar.

Buffalo must contend with Syracuse and Penn State, along with the Sabres of the National Hockey League, the Bills of the National Football League and a popular triple-A baseball team called the Bison. Northridge is going up against USC, UCLA, the Kings, the Lakers, the Clippers, the Raiders and the Dodgers.

In men’s basketball, crowds at Buffalo home games have ranged from hundreds to nearly 5,000 in the past few years. The opponent seems to dictate the attendance more than Buffalo’s win-loss record. Games against cross-town Buffalo State draw crowds 10 times the size of those for opponents such as Le Moyne.

The sport doesn’t seem to matter as long as familiar names are involved. In 1988, a men’s volleyball exhibition match between USC and top-ranked Penn State drew a crowd of 5,700 to Buffalo.

Last year, Penn State played the Puerto Rican national team before 3,000 at Buffalo.

“That’s Penn State playing the Puerto Rican nationals in volleyball and it outdrew a basketball game here the night before five to one,” Townsend said. “That’s because (Buffalo) was playing someone that nobody related to.

“Our idea here is that the competition level is important to the spirit of the institution. It gives the student population a rallying point, something they can identify with and of which they can be proud.”

Townsend predicts Buffalo regularly will play schools “with students our students feel are their peer group.” This would include such opponents as Bucknell, Cornell, Lehigh, Lafayette, Massachusetts, Delaware and, occasionally, Penn State or Notre Dame.

“You tell alumni that tomorrow you’re going to play Findlay (Ohio) College in football and they say, ‘Who? From where?’ And then they beat you 35-0 and it’s, ‘Who was that masked team?’ ” Townsend said.

“Then you realize that if you had been playing Cornell today. . . . the score still probably would have been 35-0, but it would have been a completely different experience.”

Townsend considers games against schools the size of Findlay no-win situations. “They walk away proud because they just beat that big University of Buffalo,” he said, “and we’re going home saying, ‘Who was that we played?’

“Division I is what we consider our peer group. This is a simplified reason, but we figure if we’re going to be pounded by an unknown, we might as well be pounded by a known.”

Townsend said he expects attendance to increase initially because of the upgrade in competition. But, he quickly added, “Buffalo, like any other institution, has to win.”

Half of the time probably would do.

“I’m not talking about 20-win seasons and making the NCAA Final Four,” Townsend said. “But you have to play .500. We have examples locally of programs that are classified as Division I but are doormats in their own conferences. They aren’t doing much better attendancewise than we are.”

Those examples include Niagara and St. Bonaventure, small private colleges with rich basketball traditions.

Calvin Murphy played for Niagara from 1966-70 and led the Purple Eagles to the East regional semifinals of the NCAA tournament in his senior season. Bob Lanier played for St. Bonaventure from 1967-70 and the Bonnies advanced to the Final Four in his senior season.

“They were feared programs back in those days, but they’ve slipped in posture over the years and their attendance has slipped accordingly,” Townsend said. “St. Bonaventure does OK in terms of attendance because it’s the only game in town. You either go to bed or the basketball game. Here at Buffalo, people expect a little bang for their buck. You have to give a guy a reason to not go see the Sabres tonight.”

Unlike Northridge, Buffalo has competed at the major college level before. Clemson and Maryland were Buffalo opponents during the 1973-74 basketball season and the school’s football schedule in 1967 included North Carolina State and Penn State.

Three years later, amid Vietnam War protests, Buffalo dropped football completely.

“We were experiencing a serious state of unrest,” Townsend said. “The students, always led by some faculty, of course, disbanded almost everything. The (university) was identified, rightly or wrongly, as the Berkeley of the East.”

Football was resurrected in 1977, at the same time the rest of the school’s athletic teams were stripped of scholarships. For the next 10 years, Buffalo played at the Division III level.

In 1987, Buffalo teams were moved to Division II and the school’s Division I intentions were made public. Football will remain nonscholarship until the 1992 season, and the university hopes to attain Division I-AA status the following season.

For now, money is still a problem.

“Over the years the students have increased their financial support significantly,” Townsend said. “Not as significantly as Division I is going to require, but they have gone, without a lot of coercing, from the point in 1977 when they said, ‘Here’s $15,000, guys. Go get a football team,’ to now (annually) contributing well over $250,000.”

A recently adopted student tax increase is expected to push that figure well above $500,000.

At Northridge, each student is charged a $21 “associated students fee” per semester, of which athletics gets a $4 share to use for scholarships. Based on projected enrollment figures, the sum should be close to $250,000 for the upcoming school year.

CSUN athletics also is granted money used for its daily operations through an “instructional related activities fee” of $15 per student each semester. A committee divides that money among such programs as the band, the student newspaper and KCSN radio, along with athletics.

What Buffalo has that Northridge does not are on-campus athletic facilities that would be the envy of any West Coast university.

The school has an indoor complex that includes two athletic facilities under one roof. The main venue includes a 10,000-seat arena for basketball, a 1,500-seat swim stadium, two weight rooms, a dance studio, locker rooms, classrooms, offices, 14 handball and racquetball courts and a 1/6-mile jogging track. The second area has room for three regulation basketball courts and 3,000 seats.

In addition, a 35,000-seat outdoor stadium and an additional competition pool--both paid for by the state--will be added before the school plays host to the 1993 World University Games.

“The state has not been skimpy as far as athletic facilities,” Townsend said. “They have left the fundamental, very basic requirements in place as far as what was appropriate to support us in Division II. Now they’re saying, ‘If you want to give scholarships, you find the money.’ ”

Buffalo’s basketball team will have the NCAA Division I maximum of 15 scholarships at its disposal in its first year. The school’s wrestling, women’s volleyball, men’s and women’s soccer and men’s and women’s swimming teams currently offer scholarships and expect to be funded next year at slightly above half of what NCAA guidelines allow. The rest of the school’s sports won’t begin offering grants until the fall of 1991.

Buffalo will have the only Division I athletic program of New York’s seven state universities. The rest are nonscholarship and compete in Division III.

Where the school will fit in among major colleges is a question Townsend often ponders.

“I’d like to think we’ll fit in somewhere in the middle ground,” he said. “If you turn on your TV five years from now and see (Buffalo) in the (men’s basketball) Final Four, it won’t be by design. It will be because, by some great stroke of chemistry, we just couldn’t help ourselves.”