A Step Down Would Be a Good Move

I have seen the future of Cal State Fullerton football, and its name is Division I-AAA.

It is not the future the We-Belong-on-the-Same-Field-as-Auburn dreamers necessarily want.

It is not the future the Football Waste activists necessarily want.

But it is a future where football and the limited Cal State Fullerton athletic budget can coexist without yearly multimillion-dollar community pledge drives or yearly threats to shut down any sport that involves a pommel horse, a singlet or an epee.

Division I-AAA has been described as Division III football in Division I-A makeup. It is “cost-containment football”--football for those financially strapped Division I athletic programs that want to have their kickoffs and let their other sports eat, too.

Division I-AAA permits football scholarships on a financial-need basis only. None can be awarded strictly for athletic ability.

Division I-AAA abolishes spring football practice.

Division I-AAA limits football schedules to 10 games and full-time coaching positions to three.

Division I-AAA requires each member to schedule at least 50% of its games against Division I-AAA or I-AA opponents, which, for Fullerton, would mean more Sonoma States and fewer Louisiana States.

No doubt, the football hard-heads and hard core in and around Fullerton will dig in their heels. You know the chant: Division I-A or bust--and when we bust, reel in the local corporate heavyweights for a few five-figure tax writeoffs until we bust again.

Jim Jarrett, the man who brain-stormed the idea, did not conceive Division I-AAA as a purgatory for wayward big-time football programs, a soup kitchen for the skid row of Division I-A. It is not intended to serve as the place where football programs go to die.

Jarrett hopes his game plan will save the sport at some schools and give birth to it at others--Jarrett’s included.

Jarrett is athletic director at Old Dominion University, a college that hasn’t played football since the early 1940s and would like to change that in the early 1990s. “If I-AAA doesn’t happen, Old Dominion can’t play football,” Jarrett says. “But as soon as it is passed by the NCAA, our board has said it will look at football again. Division I-AAA is the avenue to get us there.”

The inspiration for Division I-AAA came after Jarrett was dispatched on a football-feasibility search in 1986, to determine what it would take to move Old Dominion into this new dominion. Jarrett took a long look at what was out there--Division I-A, I-AA, III--and filed his consumer report.

“As we assessed it, Division I-A was not realistic at all,” Jarrett says. “Division III was in the process of ‘grandfathering’ the St. John’ses and the Daytons out of its football championship tournament. And Division I-AA was too expensive--if we were to go Division I-AA, we were looking at a $500,000-to-$1 million-a-year deficit.

“When I relayed this to our board, I was asked to look into some alternatives.”

Jarrett’s alternative came back with an additive--one more capital A.

Division I-AAA developed into a buzzword at the 1987 NCAA Convention at Dallas and has gained support, according to Jarrett, since Division III announced the restructuring of its football playoff format. Previously, Division III had been a refuge for colleges such as St. John’s, Dayton and Georgetown--schools that fielded Division I programs in other sports but sought sanctuary of a smaller scale for football. Come 1993, however, the Division III playoffs will oust those teams, limiting eligibility to schools that compete in Division III in all sports.

“The Division III people had been trying to get legislation passed for a while,” Jarrett says. “Even though schools like Georgetown only offer football scholarships on the same ‘need-based’ basis, they still can offer their athletes Division I facilities and strength coaches that carry over from the other programs. The Division III people argue that this is not equitable.”

Thus, in three years, Jarrett says, “there are going to be 3,000 kids from Division I schools that are not going to be eligible for the Division III football championship. Right now, they’re without a home. They have no place to go.

“But I-AAA will keep those 3,000 kids playing football . . . and give Old Dominion the opportunity to get into it.”

Jarrett says he’s excited. His formal Division I-AAA presentation is set for next year’s NCAA convention and he is “confident” the measure will be voted into existence for the 1993 season.

Then, Old Dominion might finally be able to put a football team inside its 25,000-seat, AstroTurf-lined football stadium. That had been the harrowing fear at Fullerton--what to do with the new football facility if there was no football team to use it. At Old Dominion, that scenario has been reality for nearly 50 years. Right now, Foreman Field is used for soccer, lacrosse and field hockey. The only football played on it is by Norfolk State and the area high schools.

“We’ve spent a considerable amount of money to refurbish it,” Jarrett says proudly. “We’re ready to go. We just need a league and a championship and a team.”

Fullerton already has the team. Headaches, too--the kind that don’t come from butting helmets on the goal line.

Division I-AAA, Jarrett says, could change that. “With I-AAA,” he says, “we feel we can offer an intercollegiate football program and break even financially.”

Break even.

That’s .500 ball, Titans.

“Obviously,” Jarrett adds, “a school like Fullerton is going to have to judge for itself if I-AAA is what it wants. But I think it’d be good for a Fullerton, a school looking at alternatives for cost-containment football.

“For Fullerton, the choice could come down to dropping football or this. It’s better to have this option than no option at all.”