CSUN Football May Be Just a Passing Fancy

It’s a hangover no aspirin will cure. Sometimes, it’s more of a migraine, a persistent headache that won’t disappear.

At a time when most colleges are plotting the particulars of their 1995 football season, top-level administrators at Cal State Northridge are deciding whether it’s worth the effort to field a team at all.

This isn’t the first time Northridge has been here.

Twenty-two months ago, football was on the chopping block as the athletic department wrangled with budget problems. The program survived the sack attack.

Yet dwindling enrollment, a sluggish economy and damage from the Northridge earthquake have saddled the department with a projected deficit of $700,000 for 1995-96. Department administrators concede that cutting football would be the quickest fix. Recent losing seasons, off-field embarrassments and student apathy have created an anti-football sentiment on campus.

A decision on Northridge football could come as soon as next week, when President Blenda J. Wilson is expected to receive a list of potential budget cuts.

Others have traveled this well-beaten path. Bill Shumard was athletic director at Cal State Fullerton when football was dropped after the 1992 season. Predictably, the campus citizenry was not altogether pleased.

“Any time you drop a sport as popular as football there’s an emotional hangover,” said Shumard, now an assistant athletic director at Long Beach State. “Even when there’s not much revenue tied to it, it hurts in the community.”

Dropping a major program is typically a complicated, disheartening process that sends tremors beyond the campus proper. Boosters question the school’s commitment to athletics, coaches and athletes are left adrift, and the business community clamps a hand on its collective wallet. It’s a public black eye--but it’s not like there haven’t been several of those already.

To be sure, Northridge wrestled with more than a few problems during a 3-7 season, and many had nothing to do with football. A starting lineman was charged with two counts of attempted murder, a crucial athletic fee referendum was narrowly defeated by students, and with two weeks left in the season, 16 players boycotted a practice.

In 1993, players also staged a practice boycott. Normalcy and upheaval are one and the same at Northridge.

“Every year there’s something new,” tight end Travis Hall said this week. “On top of that, there’s always the threat of cutting football. It’s always something.”

Public headaches only complicate matters for a program operating on what is called a “cost-containment” basis. The Northridge football team has just 17 scholarships and minimal funding, even for the NCAA Division I-AA level.

The Matadors finished last for the second consecutive year in the American West Conference, ended the season on a five-game losing streak and failed to defeat a program above the Division II level. Northridge hasn’t put together a winning record since 1990.

Throw it all together and it doesn’t generate much goodwill among Northridge denizens. If these are the economic winds of change, some want the football team standing downwind.

Ron Kopita, Northridge’s dean of students, said feedback he has received from the campus community has been running 50-50 on whether to retain football.

Kopita last month established a three-member committee of administrators to address athletic funding scenarios for 1995 and beyond. The group is scrutinizing the departmental budget--which stands at $3.6 million for 1994-95--and will outline cuts and configurations to be presented to Wilson.

If the process sounds somewhat familiar, it should. Two years ago, an independent panel of administrators and analysts formed by Wilson released a study in which it recommended that Northridge retain its I-AA football program.

The panel determined that football would cost Northridge $189,000 for 1993, in large part because the program generated $150,000 in guarantees for playing road games with Northern Arizona and Division I schools San Diego State and Nevada Las Vegas.

In an estimate he termed “pessimistic” since revenue hasn’t been fully calculated, Athletic Director Bob Hiegert said football carried a price tag of approximately $350,000 this fall when the school received only $55,000 in football guarantees. Fund-raising also is down this fall, Hiegert said.

Eliminating the program would seemingly pare the athletic department’s impending $700,000 deficit in half--but there’s a catch. The loss of football, even a shoestring program such as Northridge’s, could hamper the department’s ability to generate funds across the board, officials cautioned.

Fund-Raising Could Take a Hit

Paul Bubb, an assistant athletic director who oversees most of the department’s fund-raising ventures, said football was the key element in landing a sponsorship from a major beer manufacturer. Corporate sponsorship packages run between $14,000 and $20,000 annually and often include radio spots, Bubb said.

“Some (sponsorships) might be curtailed or cut” if football is eliminated, Bubb said.

Bubb started at Northridge five years ago, when the school moved up from Division II. Uncertainty surrounding athletics is damaging the department’s credibility in the Division I ranks, not to mention its ability to harvest the corporate and community cash crops, he said.

Corporate sponsorship packages and advertising generated $95,000 for the department in 1993-94.

“We’re behind where we could be or should be in terms of what we generate,” Bubb said. “The inability to generate or follow through on a plan of action hurts.”

With the program’s future in doubt, the private sector is watching. Gary Gray, president of the Matador Athletic Assn. board of directors, a booster club that helps generate funds for Northridge sports, said finding deep-pocket donors is next to impossible given the department’s state of flux.

“It’s difficult to get a response from the business community,” said Gray, an attorney from Encino. “(Potential donors) have a difficult time going to their board of directors and saying, ‘Let’s give to this program,’ when nobody seems sure about the direction of the program.”

Losing football won’t make fund-raising easier. Gray said it is conceivable that club membership could dwindle in light of football’s popularity, which in turn might affect fund-raising for other Northridge sports. The Athletic Assn. stages a series of golf tournaments and auctions that generate between $5,000 and $22,000 per event and whose proceeds are earmarked for several sports, Bubb said.

Last year, the association raised $170,000 for Matador athletics, of which $21,000 went to football. The totals include donations and fund-raisers. Both figures were considered uncharacteristically low because quake-related developments hindered fund-raising efforts, several department officials said.

The Domino Effect

There’s a human element, too.

Four full-time and four restricted-earnings coaching positions would be eliminated along with the football team. Coach Bob Burt’s contract, which runs through next season, stipulates that he loses his job if the program is canceled. Burt has a nine-year record of 49-46 and is one of two coaches in the program’s 33-year history with a winning career mark.

Burt has begun recruiting players for 1995. Not an enviable position in light of the program’s very public state of flux. Burt will stay the course, because the rest is out of his hands.

“If they drop the bomb, then we’ll scatter for cover,” Burt said. “I’m operating on the premise that there will be a program. I’ve got a job to do and I plan to do it as well as I can.”

Nineteen of the 73 players on the 1994 roster will be seniors next fall. If the program is cut, finding a Division I or I-AA school at which to play won’t be easy, even for the most talented.

“It’s vital to find a team and to practice in spring ball at that school,” said Hall, a junior who finished second in the conference with 47 receptions. “If they wait too long to make a decision, it’s too late. . . . Don’t keep us hanging.”

Furthermore, the department’s chances of someday joining a Division I conference with guaranteed postseason berths, such as the Big Sky, likely will evaporate if football does likewise, athletics administrators said.

If Northridge’s football program joins Long Beach, Fullerton and UC Santa Barbara on the extinction list, Southern California will be left with four teams above Division III--UCLA, USC, San Diego State and University of San Diego (a non-scholarship I-AA program).

Gray, the booster club president, has a request for Kopita and other senior school administrators: Make a mission statement and stick with it. He adds an aside: Football is worth keeping.

“Does a school opera have to turn a profit to be worthwhile?” Gray said. “Does a play or a musical event have to make money (to be staged)?

“I think to eliminate a major program hurts the totality of the university.”

Boon for Other Sports

Not everyone may mourn the possible loss of football. Former Fullerton athletic director Shumard said some coaches there claimed that football’s losing record stigmatized the entire department. In some quarters of the Titan athletic department, no tears were shed when football was flushed.

“They called it an albatross,” Shumard said. “They thought it affected everything from recruiting to our overall image.”

Football’s elimination meant more money was spread over fewer programs, Shumard said, because football’s allocation wasn’t redirected into academics.

“We were fortunate,” Shumard said. “That’s a political battle fought on any campus (in the process of trimming sports programs).”

So it seems. In fact, Hiegert said, it is an “incorrect assumption” that football’s termination means more for other Matador programs.

“Nobody has said that if we drop football, resources from the students and the state will stay the same,” Hiegert said.

Indeed, some of the department’s funding sources are unpredictable or discretionary. Revenue from certain accounts can fluctuate wildly from year to year.

To wit:

* Athletics receives $4 per student each semester and enrollment this fall fell to 24,378, down 10% from 1993-94 alone. When the school moved to Division I five years ago, projections pointed toward an enrollment of 40,000 by the turn of the century.

* In the past three years, money from the state general fund has dropped by $200,000.

* Annual funding from the school’s University Corporation, formerly called the Foundation, has fallen from $430,000 in 1993-94 to $225,000 this year. It is unclear to what degree, if any, the Corporation will fund athletics next year, Hiegert said.

All of which means Northridge coaches aren’t cartwheeling down the hallways at the thought of football being axed.

“I don’t think anybody here (among the coaching staff) is in favor of canceling football, though we might be if we thought we’d benefit from it,” said John Price, the men’s volleyball coach. “I think we’ll be funded at the same . . . level regardless.”

Even with 24,000 students, Northridge ranks among the nation’s 60 largest universities, according to NCAA figures. Shumard believes large colleges can easily maintain a national athletic identity without football.

Long Beach, a Cal State school which dropped football in 1991, unveiled a new gymnasium Nov. 30 and has designated six sports of paramount importance--men’s and women’s basketball and volleyball, baseball and softball have become departmental focal points.

Shumard said “the company line” is that being nationally competitive in these programs is not only realistic but attainable. Nobody talks much about football anymore. Long Beach has retooled.

“We have to select what we’re going to be good at and walk our talk in those sports,” Shumard said. “If you make it work in those sports, maybe you add football again later. Who knows?”