Finally a University that is smart...

More throwers read this site than I thought. Or maybe you are a sprinter and feel some connection to the sport.

Another poster had it dead on, no one at WWU gave a rat's ass about the football team. No one at most DII schools give's a crap about their home school, they rather watch better teams play on TV. I am proud to say that at my time at WWU, I never once attended a football game.

Oh and if you are a thrower, I'm suprised that moronic coach even let you participate in track. That pretentious d-bag kept plenty a good throwers and a couple of sprinters off our track team for "spring football". Give me an f'in break.

This is a great day for Western Athletics.

too bad now that football isn't there, there will be 0 income for the athletic department, and thus less funds for other sports altogether....

what you have to understand is that at most schools, football makes a PROFIT, thus cutting it is BAD for the rest of the sports, regardless of how large the budget is

In MOST schools football DOES NOT make a profit. The only self supporting football programs are the ones that share in television revenue. That ain't many!

I'm not hard core enough to post on letsrun at 6:15 am when I'm still on break. The most hard core I've ever been was a series of early morning aqua jogging sessions across Lake Padden when it was raining, cold, windy, with waves going over my head with a certain injured athlete

That post was interesting. I don't know who it is either.

uh_no wrote:

too bad now that football isn't there, there will be 0 income for the athletic department, and thus less funds for other sports altogether....

what you have to understand is that at most schools, football makes a PROFIT, thus cutting it is BAD for the rest of the sports, regardless of how large the budget is

This school is D2. If they're cutting the sport, it's safe to assume they're not good at it. Poor D2 teams don't make money. As someone else stated, for the team to remain in existence they would have to operate at a huge loss due to travel requirements.

That said, anyone who feels vindication over this has some major self-esteem issues. A bunch of kids came to a school with the expectation they could play their sport for four years while they get their degree. Now they've had that opportunity yanked out from under them. Hooray? I think not. If you cry when xc/track gets cut but cheer when football gets cut, you are seriously lacking in your people skills.

The big one wrote:

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.

The NCAA graduation stats you quote are for those on athletic scholarship only. Very misleading as the sample excludes the many student-athletes not on scholarship. Further, I believe the 2007 study only tracked student-athltes who entered schools in 2001-2003 (i.e. the 6 year window). This can work on the plus or the minus side for any given school, and IMO makes the national figure a useless stat. For example, my school only gives 20 athletic scholarships, 10 each in men's and women's basketball. So that means in any given year we have about 5-7 students who would be tracked in the study out of 300+ total student-athletes. Guess what, all 5-7 on scholarship graduated in that period so our score is 100%, even though more than a couple of our student-athletes did not graduate.

For WWU it may very well skew in the other direction. If their non-scholarship student-athletes graduate at a higher rate than the 69%, which I think is likely, then you have a stat that lacks value.

And to uh_no...Stats I saw a few years ago show that only 20-25 schools actually turn a profit off their football teams. You can say that they bring in revenue, but factor in the cost of travel, 6-7 figure coaches salaries, scholarships for 80 and you will quickly see that it's a miracle anyone is out of the red.

On the original topic...always surprising to see a college cut football but I suspect we'll see it happening more in the next few years as budgets are stretched paper thin. For most schools football is going to be the single biggest cost among all their sports. From a pure budget perspective it's got to be tempting to a college president or AD to just cut football and save a ton of cash. Not a fan of the sport, but I do feel bad for the kids who lose the chance to play the sport they love. I say that every time any school cuts a sport no matter what it is. Less opportunity is never a good thing whether it's Track/XC or Wrestling or Gymnastics or Football.

Another poster had it dead on, no one at WWU gave a rat's ass about the football team.

I've got news for you: No one gives a rat's ass about xc/track either. Football players probably think you are a bunch of skinny, wussy oxygen wasters, who just take up space on campus that could be occupied by more hot girls. Are those reasons to eliminate a sport? Of course not. You ought to be thinking twice about other athletes getting the axe at your school. You will probably be next, and no one will give a rat's ass either.

Wow, never thought of that one before. Of course I know that no one cares about running. But guess what, not a single "average" American cares about the highest level of running period.

Whether or not every college in the country has an athletics program is not the point. Americans would still not care about running.

What's funny, and what makes this bittersweet, is that the football players at DII schools actually believe fans care about them just because they happen to play this country's most popular sport. These very same football players you feel so sorry for are probably sitting around whining about how all these other "lame sports" didn't get cut and their mighty football team did.

Runner's know that no one cares either way whether their teams exist or not, so that is not a good point.

What makes this a good decision is that several other sports programs will survive because this money sucking sport is now gone. This allows MORE overall student athletes to remain student athletes. How is this not a good thing?

The fact that many other schools cut a handful of other sports so that the football team can have 200 guys "on the team" is a disgrace. I wouldn't have as much of a problem with college football if the roster sizes weren't so ridicuously huge. 60% of those meat chunks will never see the playing field, but hey, they're needed because Home Team U would never make it without 3 deep at every position.

Oh yeah, football players would think that about runners anyway, wheter we're feeling sorry or not; yet another moot point for you. And by removing this inflated roster, there will be plenty more campus space for all different kinds of students, which is always a good thing.

uh_no wrote:

too bad now that football isn't there, there will be 0 income for the athletic department, and thus less funds for other sports altogether....

what you have to understand is that at most schools, football makes a PROFIT, thus cutting it is BAD for the rest of the sports, regardless of how large the budget is

I have long been a fan of every sport having to be self-sufficient. I think this would be great, but I think charging admission for college track meets is a good idea--it makes people think it has value. Giving something away devalues a product.

Football generates revenue that is spread around the athletic department. (Basketball helps as well as the money from the NCAA basketball tourney is pretty good and spread around).

A D2 team is expensive to maintain if you have to spend a lot of money flying for games. I do not think this is a trend.

luv2run wrote:I have long been a fan of every sport having to be self-sufficient.

runner83 wrote:

http://wwuvikings.cstv.com/sports/m-footbl/spec-rel/010809aaa.html

Hopefully more universities will follow and understand that football is what costs the most. Just cutting track/xc will not fix their problems.

FYI, a university is a collection of buildings that are objects and therefore cannot possess intelligence. Therefore the university cannot be 'smart' as you so label. The university may, however, be run by a smart administration (which is the case in this instance). Please do not make this error again.

Thanks.

I was stunned to find that only 5 Division II schools in the Division II West Region (AK, AZ, CA, HI, ID, MT, NV, OR, UT, WA) have football. I pulled some data from the NCAA.org website on sport sponsorhip for XC and football.

# of schools that sponsor these sports and % relative to women's XC:

West

Football Men's XC Women's XC

Total 51 53% 81 84% 96

Division I 31 67% 38 83% 46

Division II 5 18% 23 82% 28

Division III 15 68% 20 91% 22

NCAA All

Football Men's XC Women's XC

Total 633 64% 915 92% 992

Division I 238 73% 301 92% 327

Division II 154 57% 241 89% 270

Division III 241 61% 373 94% 395

I wonder how the rest of the GNAC in football will hold on. Dixie is close enough to the Colorado schools, but Humboldt, Western Oregon, and Central Washington just lost 18% of their schedule with nothing close to replace it.

advice wrote:

runner83 wrote:http://wwuvikings.cstv.com/sports/m-footbl/spec-rel/010809aaa.html

Hopefully more universities will follow and understand that football is what costs the most. Just cutting track/xc will not fix their problems.

FYI, a university is a collection of buildings that are objects and therefore cannot possess intelligence. Therefore the university cannot be 'smart' as you so label. The university may, however, be run by a smart administration (which is the case in this instance). Please do not make this error again.

Thanks.

lrn2synecdoche

Ahhh ha ha ha. Now what are all you losers going to do without your precious foosball?!

No more Pick 'ems!

REASONS THE NCAA IS NOW CONCERNED ABOUT FOOTBALL ATHLETE GRADUATION RATES:

1) New Orleans Saint RB George Rogers when asked about the upcoming season: "I want to rush for 1,000 or 1,500 yards, whichever comes first."

2) Bill Peterson, a Florida State football coach: "You guys line up alphabetically by height." And, "You guys pair up in groups of three, then line up in a circle."

3) And, upon hearing Joe Jacobi of the 'Skins say: "I'd run over my own mother to win the Super Bowl", Matt Millen of the Raiders said: "To win, I'd run over Joe's Mom, too."

4) Torrin Polk, University of Houston receiver, on his coach, John Jenkins: "He treats us like men. He lets us wear earrings."

5) Football commentator and former player Joe Theismann, 1996: "Nobody in football should be called a genius. A genius is a guy like Norman Einstein."

If you are really interesting in learning how profitable football is or isn’t, this long article "Football is a Sucker's Game" (published in 2002) is perhaps one of the best articles written on the subject.

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9A0DE0DB173DF931A15751C1A9649C8B63&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=print

Here are a few excerpts:

Football is the S.U.V. of the college campus: aggressively big, resource-guzzling, lots and lots of fun and potentially destructive of everything around it. At the highest level, universities wage what has been called an ''athletic arms race'' to see who can build the most lavish facilities to attract the highest-quality players. Dollars are directed from general funds and wrestled from donors, and what does not go into cherry-wood lockers, plush carpets and million-dollar weight rooms ends up in the pockets of coaches, the most exalted of whom now make upward of $2 million a year.

College sports now consists of a class of super-behemoths -- perhaps a dozen or so athletic departments with budgets of $40 million and up -- and a much larger group of schools that face the choice of spending themselves into oblivion or being embarrassed on the field. (Which may happen in any case.)

One reason B.C.S. members do not want to share is that college sports have become so immensely expensive that even some of the biggest of the big lose money. The University of Michigan, which averages more than 110,000 fans for home football games, lost an estimated $7 million on athletics over the course of two seasons, between 1998 and 2000. Ohio State had athletic revenues of $73 million in 1999-2000 and ''barely managed to break even,'' according to the book ''Unpaid Professionals: Commercialism and Conflict in Big-Time College Sports,'' by Andrew Zimbalist, a Smith College economics professor. A state audit revealed that the University of Wisconsin lost $286,700 on its Rose Bowl appearance in 1998 because it took a small army, a traveling party of 832, to Pasadena.

One study showed the SAT scores of football players at Division I-A schools to be 271 points lower than incoming non-athletes. ''You have kids brought to campus and maybe, maybe they could be real students if they studied 60 hours a week and did nothing else,'' Dowling says. ''But everyone knows that's not happening. It's not their fault. They've been lied to in high school, all these African-American kids who get told that playing ball is their way up in society, even though it's never been that for any other ethnic group in America. It's dishonest. It's filthy.''

In college sports, the heady mix of anticipation, adrenaline, camaraderie and school pride is the gloss over the grubby reality. Pro sports operates within some financial parameters, governed by a profit motive. College sport, by contrast, is a mad cash scramble with squishy rules. Universities run from conference to conference, chasing richer TV deals; coaches from school to school, chasing cash. It's a game of mergers and acquisitions -- of running out on your partners before they run out on you.

On Dec. 12, 2002 the University of South Florida ripped up Jim Leavitt's contract and signed him to a new five-year deal that more than doubled his salary. If he keeps winning, he probably won't make it to the final year of this contract, either, when he's scheduled to make nearly $700,000. U.S.F. will have to pay more to keep him, or other programs will come looking to steal him away. That's how it is when you decide to play with the big boys. The bills just keep on getting bigger.

survival wrote:

In MOST schools football DOES NOT make a profit. The only self supporting football programs are the ones that share in television revenue. That ain't many!

so you mean just about every BCS school...

From a column at SI.com today:

Florida and Oklahoma, the schools that played Thursday for the BCS title, make enough money to have self-sustaining athletic departments. At least three-fourths of the 120 schools in the NCAA's Football Bowl Subdivision do not.

(emphasis added)

http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2009/writers/andy_staples/01/09/playoff/index.html

That leaves half of the BCS-conference schools losing money plus all the others.

I think that football has an effect that goes beyond pure revenue. It is a powerful marketing tool. People need to know that your school exists to start to have an interest in attending, and football is one of the main things that gets the name of a school out. How many people out there would know anything about Penn State if it didn't have a football team? Having attended, I can say that it is average at best in the academic department. Yet I imagine that everyone here has heard of the school. Most of you probably even know what town it is in.

Look at Florida schools alone. What Florida schools are most well known to people outside the state? I'd say University of Florida, Florida State, and Miami probably are. Why Miami? How many other schools with 10,000 undergrads are household names outside of football schools and Ivy League schools? Central Florida, on the other hand, is one of the largest schools in the country, yet it isn't nearly as well known as Miami. I think it's safe to say that football can make a school famous.