Cal State Fullerton Keeps Football on the Sideline

The helmets and shoulder pads in the Cal State Fullerton equipment room will continue to collect cobwebs for at least another year, because there will be no Titan football next fall.

“Current budget planning in the CSU system calls for additional reductions in state funding for 1994-95,” Milton Gordon, school president, said in a release issued Tuesday. “It would be unrealistic to bring football back under these conditions.”

The release merely made official what everyone in the Titan athletic department had suspected for weeks.

Though revenue from a new student athletics fee will begin pumping an additional $500,000 a year into the department next fall, the school had done virtually nothing--mainly, hire a coach and recruit players this winter--to indicate it would field a team for 1994.

But what about 1995 and beyond?

Previous athletic department studies projected the price of Division I-AA, cost-containment football to be about $500,000 a year, and there would be a home for the Titans in the I-AA American West Conference, which was formed in 1993 and consists of Cal State Northridge, Sacramento State, Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, Southern Utah and UC Davis.

But football would use all of the additional student funds, which otherwise would be used to strengthen existing programs, including the highly successful baseball, softball and soccer teams, which have been hit hard by budget cuts in recent years.

There’s also the gender equity issue, which presents a bigger roadblock for football than money. Without football, Fullerton is practically in compliance with federal and state gender equity laws--that is, roughly 53% of the student-athletes on campus are men and 47% are women.

The addition of football, even with a minimum roster in the 50- to 60-player range, without an equal boost in women’s athletes, probably would put Fullerton in violation of a court order to achieve gender equity within five years.

“There are just too many things to consider (before making a decision about 1995),” Gordon said in an interview. “We’re going to take it a year at a time. Other sports have suffered and we want to improve those. There are a lot of factors, but the main thing I’m looking for is a stable budget.”

Fullerton began playing football in 1970 at the College Division level, moved to Division I-A in 1975 and remained there until 1992, when the school dropped the sport after a 2-9 season.