this is why SJSU should be I-AA
We should be I-AA solely because we lost to SMU, but that's beside the point. We
lost $500K on the annual "invite the black college with the great marching band to come play football becuase they'll bring the band, we'll sell out, and that game will help our average attendance which we need to have in order to stay Div I" game. This is after a year of budget cuts that saw the WRITING CENTER get cut. The Writing Center, which was in the English Dept but served the entire community of 25K+ undergrads, many, MANY of whom are ESL students or other students which desperately need the Writing Center, cost $100K per year. It cost one-fifth of what the school
lost on a game meant to provide income and an attendance boost (it didn't).
I am a huge fan of athletics, and I believe they are very important to colleges and universities. But I am not a big fan of sucking money away from other parts of the university in order to remain Div I-A. Last night, the football team played to a
70-63 win over Rice, which is all well and good...to a crowd of 4,000. Four thousand is significantly less than the 10,000 average needed by the NCAA to remain D-I.
One of the arguments is that if football drops to D-IAA or D-II, that they'll have to drop out of the WAC and go to something like the Big Sky, and they'll have to drop some other sports, including some women's sports, to remain Title IX compliant. To this I say...."and? what's the problem?" I agree that football is much more important to a university from a revenue and marketing standpoint than gymnastics—not to take anything away from the gymnasts themselves who I'm sure are fine people in addition to being fine athletes—so come on! Drop down, realign, cut the sports you need to cut, remain Title IX compliant, and move on. What's worse—being the laughingstock of D-I football, or having to drop down like UC Davis, Sac State, etc., WIN, and not cost the school other important resources?
