Thrown for Biggest Loss Yet

Cal State Northridge is poised to sack football, a move that not only would end 40 years of college play in the San Fernando Valley, but also create a void for local high school and junior college players who prefer to continue their careers close to home.

The Matadors play their season finale at Portland State on Saturday, and University President Jolene Koester has said she will decide by Thanksgiving if that will be Northridge’s final game.

Athletic Director Dick Dull wants to eliminate football to help remedy budget shortfalls within the athletic program that are expected to reach $725,000 by the end of this school year. His recommendation to eliminate the sport already has been approved by a campus advisory board, and the school announced Tuesday that two outside experts hired to produce an independent report agreed with Dull’s plan.

Without Northridge, football would remain at only six of the 23 schools in the Cal State University system--none between San Diego and Fresno. Northridge, the only Big West Conference school that plays football, is in its first year of playing the sport as an independent at the NCAA Division I-AA level after five seasons as a member of the Big Sky Conference.

“It really narrows the kids’ choices,” said Jeff Engilman, longtime football coach at Sylmar High. “Basically, if they’re not [Division I] caliber, they’re looking at a JC or a Division II-type school.”

San Diego State, which is looking for a new coach after Ted Tollner was reassigned on Monday, would have Southern California’s only surviving state program. The other CSU programs are Fresno and San Jose, which, like San Diego, play Division I; San Luis Obispo and Sacramento, which play at the Division I-AA level; and Division II Humboldt.

Twenty-five years ago, 15 Cal State universities played football. Cal State Los Angeles was first to drop out, in 1977. Next to fall was Pomona in 1982, followed by six more--Long Beach, Fullerton, Chico, Sonoma, Hayward and San Francisco--in the 1990s.

In their heyday, Cal State programs fostered several success stories: Damon Allen, arguably the best player produced by Fullerton, became a star in the Canadian Football League. Another Titan, Mark Collins, played cornerback for the Super Bowl champion New York Giants. Jim Zorn parlayed his success at Pomona into a nine-year NFL career. Long Beach produced Terry Metcalf, a successful pro running back in the 1970s.

Chasen Walker, a freshman cornerback for Northridge, hoped to follow in their footsteps. The 5-foot-10, 172-pound Beverly Hills High graduate generated moderate interest from big schools, but he relished the opportunity to play college football near home.

“It was a Division I program and I knew that I’d be given a chance to play [right away],” he said.

Administrators say football has failed at CSU schools for two major reasons: Expense and gender-equity requirements.

A lengthy recession early in the 1990s forced some athletic programs to cut their budgets as much as 30%. In almost every instance, football was the big expenditure--and therefore an easy target.

Also, the consent decree from a 1993 settlement between the CSU and the California chapter of the National Organization for Women required that funding and participation levels of men’s and women’s athletic programs be brought into line.

Bob Burt, Northridge’s head football coach from 1986-94, said those rules, while leveling the gender playing field, resulted in a numbers game that some schools couldn’t win. With money so tight, many colleges used an equation of adding by subtraction--they cut men’s programs in order to fund the bolstering of women’s teams.

“The problem is there is no comparable [women’s] sport for football,” said Burt, now the coach at Lake Elsinore Temescal Canyon High. “Gender equity wants the same number of scholarships, but to do that you [should] take football out of the mix.”

Northridge’s program has lacked stability for years. It was on the verge of extinction in 1995 until a $27 fee referendum was passed in a vote of students.

But finances are only part of the problem for Southern California-based CSUs. With great weather, the beach, and so many other entertainment options--UCLA and USC among them--securing a sizable fan following for not-quite-ready-for-prime-time football is difficult.

Consider Fullerton’s plight in 1984. The Titans had a record of 11-1 and were ranked as high as 19th in the nation, yet drew an average of fewer than 9,000 fans to their home games.

“From Day 1, we said we were going to reach those people and we could never do it,” said Gene Murphy, who was Fullerton’s head coach from 1979-92. “There’s the big colleges, there’s pro sports, there’s the beach. It’s very difficult to sell football here.”

Since the school started keeping attendance records in 1980, Northridge has never averaged 5,000 for a season, and has averaged just 3,570 fans for home games since 1993, its first Division I-AA season.

The Matadors’ home field, outdated North Campus Stadium--a converted horse racing track--will be torn down after the season. If Northridge does keep football, the team will rent--at the cost of $120,000--the facility at Pierce College in Woodland Hills for the next two seasons.

Richard West, the CSU’s executive vice chancellor and chief financial officer, said a football program can’t survive today without a substantial following that will allow it to be self sufficient.

“When you’ve got two or three thousand coming to games, where’s the money going to come from?” West said. “It has to come out of the campus budget.

“If you have to subsidize your program out of the general fund, that’s a problem.”

Jeff Kearin, Northridge football coach since 1999, has his own plan to save football. It involves subtracting 15 players from his roster--to help even participation levels with women’s sports--but adding 15 football scholarships. The math could actually work because the Matadors have so many players on partial scholarships.

Northridge funds 45 scholarships, but the coach wants that boosted to 60 so the Matadors would meet bowl championship series requirements as an opponent. Then, Kearin said, he will schedule at least three away games against major-college schools in exchange for guaranteed six-figure paychecks.

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The strategy has been used before. Fullerton used to play the likes of Georgia and Louisiana State--”body-bag games,” Murphy, the head coach, called them--for big paychecks.

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Long Beach Athletic Director Bill Shumard was in charge of Fullerton’s athletic program when the Titans dropped football, and he stands by that decision. “It was a drain on the whole program,” he said.

Shumard said Long Beach has flourished without football, perhaps becoming a model that Dull wants to follow. Money once spent on football has gone to beef up basketball, volleyball and other sports.

In their report to Koester, college sports experts Bob Goin and Joseph Crowley wrote that Northridge’s decision to drop football is “virtually inarguable” given the current circumstances of cost, facilities and financial support.

So where will the local players go?

“A lot of them would like to stay in California, but now we find ourselves trying to sell them on schools out of state,” said Bill Fisk, Mt. San Antonio College’s longtime coach.

Walker, the Northridge defensive back, might soon be among those forced to look elsewhere. “I just hope for the best,” he said, “but I plan for the worst.”

If Northridge folds, he and his teammates can always hope they’ll become the next Terrell Davis.

The Denver Bronco running back was at Long Beach but transferred to Georgia when the 49ers eliminated their program. A few years later, he was starring for a Super Bowl champion.