What Price Football Glory? : At Fullerton, a successful but beleaguered gymnastics coach throws in the mat

Cal State Fullerton’s football team is stretched so far out of its league that you can almost hear the institutional tendons pull. But on the same campus, men’s gymnastics coach Dick Wolfe, who has led a modestly funded but enterprising little program to a series of national titles over 23 years, has just announced his resignation in a public display of frustration.

Budget cuts a year ago slashed his salary in half, forcing him to work as a janitor and gardener to make ends meet, and this year cutbacks left his program on the brink of extinction. He has sent a telling letter to colleagues in the campus coaching corps: “A couple of times I’ve reached the top of the hill only to find not a light at the end of the tunnel but, rather, someone much larger than I with a two-by-four.”

Clearly, the state budget crisis is swinging a very heavy piece of lumber these days in the face of even the most successful college programs, like UCLA’s and San Diego State’s. But if times are so tight, they may in some cases require a fundamental reordering of assumptions about which college athletic programs are really worth supporting on a particular campus. When money is scarce, it may not make sense to abandon winning gymnasts in favor of losing football players.

At the root of the dilemma is the financial reality of big-time college football. The pursuit of winning Saturdays and the dollars to make them possible are directly tied to Cal State Fullerton’s relentless pursuit of football. The school was ranked last among major college football teams last year, but still scrambles to keep the program alive. By contrast, the gymnastics coach is about to take his team to the NCAA Championships as one of his last official acts.

The school is so hard-pressed financially that it has announced plans to reduce academic class offerings, and to add 7 a.m. and Saturday morning lecture classes next fall to try to make ends meet.

Amid this belt-tightening, the football program has just embarked on a major fund-raising program that everyone acknowledges will require nearly $1.1 million over the next two years just to keep things afloat.

It may not be entirely fair to make the pursuit of football’s ambitions a scapegoat for all the attendant aches and pains as a state budget crisis comes home to roost on campus. But the crunch does make it more difficult to justify the pursuit of imagined revenue from a losing football program even as the gymnastics coach has managed to have winning seasons on a $5,000 budget.

Something’s definitely wrong with this picture.