Northridge to Keep Football Program

Cal State Northridge will continue its football program and move up to an NCAA Division I-AA conference in the fall, university President Blenda J. Wilson announced Monday, ending weeks of speculation that the team would be disbanded.

The announcement came several weeks after a Wilson-appointed advisory commission recommended that the football program be continued, and a full week after she admittedly had made the decision.

During several weeks of debate, during which Wilson said it was conceivable that the school’s 31-year football program would be abandoned because of financial problems at the school, Coach Bob Burt put all recruiting efforts on hold. He was told of Wilson’s decision Monday morning, 20 minutes before the formal announcement.

“The coaches and all the players had to wait to see if there would be a team or not,” Burt said. “Because of that, it very well may be that we don’t sign any high school players this year. Until now, we couldn’t offer them anything.

“But this announcement clearly states that we are here and we will be here. Right now the thing we need is to be viable, particularly financially. We need people in the community to step forward and help us.”

The school announced several weeks ago that the 1993-94 athletic budget will be slashed $170,000 from last year’s budget, a 10% cutback. The football team will take in $122,000 from guarantees in the upcoming season from games against San Diego State, Nevada Las Vegas and Northern Arizona, and projections show that the university will have to contribute about $188,000 to the football program this year.

With proposed severe cutbacks in faculty at the school, which has already been forced to eliminate more than 1,000 classes in the past 12 months, the football program was singled out by some faculty members as a costly and unnecessary venture. “I believe that the university, even in times of fiscal stress, must speak to the needs of all students and must maintain its role as a contributor to community life,” Wilson said.

“It is extremely difficult to balance competing demands for funds when those funds are in short supply. But this university must continue to offer a balanced array of programs that support student growth and development.”

Faculty President Louise Lewis was unavailable for comment.

With the announcement, the school notified the Western Football Conference of its desire to continue its membership in the conference along with Cal State Sacramento, Cal Poly San Luis Obispo and Southern Utah. Joining the WFC in the fall will be UC Davis, which previously played in the Division II Northern California Athletic Conference. The WFC will move from its longstanding Division II status to Division I-AA in the fall.

“I wasn’t really surprised,” said senior Ivy Calvin, a linebacker on the team. “But if it had gone the other way, I know I would have packed up and left tomorrow, and a lot of other players would have done the same thing . . . at least 25 of them that I know of.

“The whole thing was strange. It always seems like the minority people are the first to go when they want to make cuts, and football has a lot of minority players, so they figured maybe they could sacrifice us.”

Northridge Athletic Director Bob Hiegert said he and his staff felt relief. “I had thought of all the possibilities,” he said, “including not having a football program at this university, and the only thing that kept crossing my mind was, ‘That would not be the right decision.’

“We asked for one thing, and that was a clear message from the administration as to the road that athletics would take so we in the athletic department could get on with our business. We got that message.”

Burt said he never believed Northridge would drop the football program, but that possibility put tremendous pressure on him, his assistants and returning players and recruits. He said he had expected to sign six high school players by mid-February but all six balked when they learned of the possible end to the program and refused to commit to CSUN. Burt said Monday he is not sure if any of the six would reconsider CSUN.

He also recruited seven junior college players in the past three months, including three from Cal State Fullerton, which disbanded its program in December. Burt said he was confident all the JC transfers would honor their commitment to CSUN.

“It has been like having a noose around our necks and standing on the hanging platform,” Burt said. “We had to wait for someone to either take the noose off or drop us through.

“While I firmly believed all along that we’d have a football program in the fall, it was difficult to talk to recruits and have any integrity.”

The average attendance at football games at rundown North Campus Stadium in recent years has been more than 3,000, a fact Burt pointed out to critics of the team.

“I challenged them to find one event on this campus that has attendance as large as any one of our games, other than graduation,” Burt said.

“We get 3,000 and 4,000 and even 6,000 people at some games. It’s a part of our culture. And at CSUN, the interest is there.

“Like it or not, this is football.”