Finally a University that is smart...

damn, you beat me to it!

http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/cfootball/395309_western09.html

Iona is also cutting it's football program.

I am so proud to say that I am an alumni and former Viking runner right now.

The university is very strong academically and they realized what their core competancy truly is. By eliminating all football student-athletes they will be getting rid of the dumbest 150 students on campus each and every year.

Add that to the fact that most negative "extra curricular news" usually centers around these meatheads.

It helps that the former President of USATF, Bill Roe, is a track coach there.

The 2007 NCAA Report found that 69 percent of Western student-athletes receive their degrees in six years or fewer. That was five percentage points higher than the average for student-athletes in the 10-team Great Northwest Athletic Conference (64 percent), and 14 points higher than the national average for NCAA II schools (55 percent).

Wow. DII athletes are a little on the slow side.

Universities that cut football have a tough time attracting males to the campus. WWU will soon be a school for girls.

The University of Chicago cut football in the 1930s, despite winning multiple Western Conference (now the Big 10) championships and the first Heisman trophy. They were the true "Monsters of the Midway," not da Bears.

A proud alum.

U of Chicago, "where fun goes to die." No wonder.

LaSalle did this last year.

usually post w/ another handle wrote:

I am so proud to say that I am an alumni and former Viking runner right now.

The university is very strong academically and they realized what their core competancy truly is. By eliminating all football student-athletes they will be getting rid of the dumbest 150 students on campus each and every year.

Add that to the fact that most negative "extra curricular news" usually centers around these meatheads.

Agreed. The football players were the cockiest idiots on campus. They acted like they were big shots in order to compensate for the fact they weren't good enough to play Division I. Maybe if they had represented themselves better more students would have gone to their games.

From D-III all the way through D-1AA, except for the best teams in each division, football is usually just a black hole for money. If an athletics department becomes strapped for funds, it should be one of the first things considered for cuts.

If a D-1A program cuts football though, it's basically just an admission that all the boys there have vaginas. Who would want to go to a big school that didn't have a football team? Besides guys with vaginas of course.

BU doesn't seem to have any problem with it . . . the overall performance of the athletic program improved after eliminating football . . . . although BU isn't necessarily a good example because their premier sport is hockey.

Yesterday wrote:

U of Chicago, "where fun goes to die." No wonder.

Isn't University of Chicago instituting co-ed dorm rooms next year?

hariette wrote:

Universities that cut football have a tough time attracting males to the campus. WWU will soon be a school for girls.

Which would you rather have: a football team or an excess of women at your school?

4runner wrote:

hariette wrote:

Universities that cut football have a tough time attracting males to the campus. WWU will soon be a school for girls.

Which would you rather have: a football team or an excess of women at your school?

Yeah, exactly. Unless you go to a big conference school that draws 50,000+ to Football games, Football programs are not a big draw I would guess for most college males. Most guys aren't going to go to the games and are staying home to watch big IA games that are on television on Saturday. I go to a small conference I-AA school and Football here sucks. In the three years I've been here on campus I've attended maybe 3 games. The quality of football sucks, attendance here sucks, because everyone would rather stay home and watch other teams on TV.

I couldn't be more happy if our school dropped Football to support the other sports.

Agreed. I was at a d3 school, football team was mediocre, I had no interest in watching games with 5-10 turnovers and otherwise sloppy play. The biggest impact they had was to make the locker room reek, turn the showers into a giant urinal, and basically take up space- both physically and with their budget. I would love to see the school drop them and use the savings to hold down tuition costs-even if just by a fraction- for one year.

I wish my school would do this - maybe then we wouldn't have to deal with the issue of our women's track team getting 10 scholarships and our men's team getting 3 and everyone asking me why our women compete for conference titles and our men compete to not get last.

You are the idiot in this situation. To say that the football players at WWU acted how they did to make up for the fact that they weren't good enough to play D1 just makes me sick. Are the current runners just at Western because they weren't good enough to go D1? Hopefully not. Western is a solid school in an amazing location. Did you ever consider that maybe some of the football players went there because of this? Or do you just see WWU as a fall back school? If it is the latter, shame on you.

The football program got cut because there just aren't enough D2 football programs on the west coast to allow for appropriate competition while also allowing for affordable travel. West of the Rockies there are now only four D2 teams sponsoring football - Humboldt State, Western Oregon, Central Washington, and Dixie State. Try filling up a nine game schedule when you still need five more games. It wasn't an issue of not having enough fans at the home games, it was the fact that the away contests were just so costly.

This is a sad day for Western athletics. As a former D2 athlete from a program that didn't get support from anyone who wasn't a family member or friend, you can't help but to pull for other small college athletes who are in your same situation. Can you imagine how devastated you'd be if they had canned the track/xc teams? We are always reading stories about other programs are being cut around the country, and imagining how horrible that would be. However, I never thought WWU would be a place where this could happen. This just hit too close to home.

With the current economic situation and the state of Washington slashing budgets in general, this likely won't have much impact on the other programs at WWU other than keeping them afloat. At the current time, this is about all that we can ask for.... a chance.

Cry me a river. I bled for my alma mater, then they cut my sport, lied to me about it, and spent millions on new sports facilities. We're all sharing some pain and there's going to be a lot more to come.