Northridge Might Drop Football, Wilson Says : College athletics: First-year president warns that program is in jeopardy, despite findings of blue-ribbon panel that largely endorsed the school’s sports program.

The Cal State Northridge football program might be dropped, CSUN President Blenda J. Wilson said Friday, despite findings of a blue-ribbon panel commissioned by Wilson that largely endorsed the school’s athletic program.

“It is conceivable we will fulfill (the 1993 football schedule),” Wilson said. “It is conceivable we will not fulfill it.”

Wilson said she will talk to faculty, students and community members before deciding if Northridge should join an NCAA Division I-AA cost-containment football affiliation that has set a March 1 deadline for membership.

Wilson said in any case football must be available on a cost-containment basis to justify its retention.

The CSUN football program has been in transition since January, 1992 when the NCAA passed legislation, effective this fall, that requires schools to compete at the same level in all sports.

Regardless of football’s fate, Wilson made it clear that the entire athletic program will receive less from the general fund than the $1.9 million currently earmarked in the 1993-94 budget. She would not specify how much of a cut the program faces.

One source of compensatory funding could come from the student body, said Wilson, in her first year as president.

In a gauge of students’ support for athletics, she will ask them to vote on a proposal in which their fees would increase for the benefit of the 18-sport athletic program.

Though the blue-ribbon report was well received Friday by athletics officials, Wilson’s football announcement was shocking.

Football Coach Bob Burt has signed 10 junior college transfers, and Athletic Director Bob Hiegert completed the football schedule last month after long negotiations.

The schedule includes games against San Diego State, Nevada Las Vegas and Northern Arizona that would bring $122,000 into the athletic program, almost three times the guarantee total Northridge earned in 1992.

Burt, in attendance at the press conference, expressed surprise at Wilson’s announcement, although he accepted it philosophically. “Limbo is one of the things I do best,” he said.

When asked what he will tell new recruits and returning players, Burt said: “I’ll tell them to do the same thing I have to do, to concentrate on playing San Diego State Sept. 4 and not to worry about what they have no control over.”

Linebacker Doug Humphrey, a transfer from Oregon State who enrolled in school Monday, was shocked. “That blows my mind,” he said. “I was told we were playing for sure, starting with San Diego State.”

By telephone from Arizona, Hiegert said that he supports the football program and believes students and community members will show Wilson their support for retaining it.

“I think it would be unfair to drop football,” he said. “And if the decision is made to drop it, economically, it makes more sense to drop it after the ’93 season.”

Coaches’ contracts, which account for $111,200, and scholarship money, which accounts for $120,872, must be honored through 1993.

Based on the 1992 budget, and subtracting revenue from expenses, the athletic program would save $188,572 if football was dropped. However, meeting the coaching contracts and scholarships obligations would result in a net cost of $43,500.

Asked what he will tell recruits, Hiegert said: “What do you say to coaches and their families? Their futures are hanging. I would tell them to be patient and hopeful.”

The six-member blue-ribbon panel, formed Nov. 11 by Wilson, was chaired by Ira Michael Heyman, former chancellor of California-Berkeley.

It included: Vivian Fuller, Northeastern Illinois athletic director; Robert Krause, Kansas State vice president; Katherine Mulholland, community leader; Ronald Lemos, assistant vice chancellor for academic affairs, plans and programs in the CSU system, and Don Dyer, a partner in the accounting firm of Coopers & Lybrand.

The panel recommended that Northridge retain its athletics program, continue at the Division I level in all sports except football, and play football at the I-AA level.

Like several coaches, baseball Coach Bill Kernen had no fears that the committee would recommend that CSUN move back to Division II.

“I never doubted that intelligent, well-informed people could come up with anything but that,” Kernen said.

The panel’s findings serve as a vote of confidence for Hiegert’s administration, which has been under attack since last spring by African-American student-athletes who charged the athletics program with racism, and by faculty members who tried to divert CSUN Foundation funding from athletics to other programs.

The report stressed two primary areas of concern, echoing recommendations from an on-campus task force that the athletic program was lax in providing academic advisement and lacked minority representation.

Last fall, Wilson created a position for an academic adviser specifically for athletics.

A search committee is screening candidates in an effort to diversify a program that the blue ribbon-panel described as “led and largely peopled by white men with long-term CSUN relationships.”

Indeed, four of the head coaches have been in the program more than 20 years, two others have been coaching for 10 years or longer and six of the 11 head coaches are graduates of CSUN.