University Archives, California Polytechnic State UniversityThis is the third of a three-part series about Cal Poly’s 2008
football schedule, the school’s on-hiatus rivalry with Sacramento State and the dwindling landscape of college football within California.
George Allen told reporters the most rewarding season of his career wasn’t leading the Washington Redskins to Super Bowl VII in 1972, nor winning either of his NFL Coach of the Year honors, in 1967 and 1971.
Instead, the Pro Football Hall of Famer said, it was 1990, when he directed Long Beach State to a 6-5 record.
So happy were Allen’s players, with their season-ending 29-20 victory Nov. 17, 1990 over UNLV, that they doused the 72-year-old with ice water.
On New Year’s Eve, Allen would be dead, and a season later, Long Beach State football would follow, after 36 years of life.
“The program started to get a little buzz,” says Steve Janisch, an assistant athletics director at Long Beach State. “Some people feel had he not passed away, it may have taken off. He was such a powerful figure and a rallying point to the community, it was a horrible shame. Who knows what could’ve happened?”
Allen’s wouldn’t be the only California college football program to pass away, however – far from it.
Since 1992, nine others Cal Poly used to play regularly (through an all-time total of 137 games) have also discontinued football. Going back to 1971 puts four more in the cemetery (67 additional games).
Six of the Mustangs’ 10 opponents in 1975 no longer play, and of the four left, only one still plays at their level – the Football Championship Subdivision (formerly Division I-AA), comprised of 125 teams. Three moved up to the Football Bowl Subdivision (formerly Division I-A), now incorporating seven California schools.
According to 2007 U.S. Census Bureau population estimates, of the 38 states with FCS representation, none has as low of a team density per capita as California, with just four members for more than 36 million would-be fans. New York, with just more than 19 million, has 10 teams to choose from. Even South Carolina, with about four-and-a-half million people, can pick from seven.
“It’s tragic,” says Cal Poly head coach Rich Ellerson of the trend, which in 2004 resulted in St. Mary’s informing 14 incoming freshmen who’d signed letters of intent that the team they’d committed to no longer existed, inspiring Neil Hayes of the Contra Costa Times to advise, “Go east, young man. There is little opportunity here.”
Indeed, Cal Poly, which was forced into several reportedly six-figure appearance-fee contracts this season (totaling at least $780,000), and will play twice as many games in the Central time zone (four) as it will against foes from California (two), is something of a football rarity on the West Coast: a survivor.
“There’s nobody out here anymore,” says Michael Simpson, athletics director at San Francisco State, which last took the gridiron in 1994.
University officials throughout the state attribute the losses primarily to funding inadequacies, spurred by the state’s ongoing budget crisis.
Most added that the insufficiencies were ultimately intensified by gender-equity measures (primarily Title IX of the 1972 Education Amendments to the Civil Rights Act of 1964) not being properly followed over time, leaving schools with few options upon having to satisfy more stringent, actively monitored guidelines.
Gender equity became more enforced through a 1993 lawsuit by the California chapter of the National Organization for Women against the California State University, which settled that by the 1998-99 school year, all CSU campuses’ female athletic representation had to be within 5 percent of the student body’s actual demographic makeup, and that allocation of funding had to be within 10 percent of reflecting the demographic ratio.
At the time of the first-of-its-kind settlement, women reportedly made up 53 percent of the system’s student population, yet only 25 percent of its athletic budgets were spent on women’s programs.
Today, according to the CSU’s fall 2007 enrollment summary, women make up 56.7 percent of the 23-campus system’s undergraduates, and excepting Maritime Academy, Cal Poly (56.9-percent male) was one of just two anomalies, with its sister campus in Pomona (57.2-percent male) being the other.
“Cal Poly’s in a bit of a unique situation with regard to gender equity,” says Alison Cone, Cal Poly’s athletics director. “I’d say largely due to some of the unique majors we have here, we haven’t had the female enrollment as much as male, so our measuring stick is different than most. It’s a very unusual situation.”
According to 2006-07 data provided by Cone, $1,539,806 (or 58.2 percent) of the school’s total $2,647,446 doled out that year in athletically-related student aid was awarded to men, who at the time made up 56.3 percent of the school’s undergraduates.
Of 180.94 scholarship equivalencies awarded, 105.94 (or 58.5 percent) went to men, and of the 336 total students receiving athletic aid, 208 (or 62 percent) were men.
Eighty-nine of those men – receiving a total of $812,706 – played football; the next closest sport was women’s basketball, whose 17 students receiving athletic aid accounted for $252,549.
Most schools’ undoing, Cone says, is that they weren’t in compliance with Title IX and “allowed things to get way out of whack and all of sudden needed a big fix” when money was tighter.
“When budgets were robust, they didn’t make adjustments that could’ve saved some sports,” she explains. “Then they got to a crisis point and said, ‘Oh, gosh, we don’t have any money.’ ”
Chances of returns by Poly’s departed sparring partners of the past aren’t realistic, Cone says.
“You can add cross country, because you’re talking about eight to 12 athletes,” she says. “But that’s not near the same expense of bringing in 100 athletes necessary for a football team. It’s just a shame of waiting until budgets are tight and then having to dump it. It ends up being a permanent solution for a temporary problem, and that’s really sad.”
Janisch agrees a team’s farewell is almost always a final one.
“Every now and then you hear stuff, but it’s shot down mainly because of financial reasons,” he says of interest in resurrecting football at Long Beach State, for which future NFL MVP Terrell Davis played his first collegiate season before being forced to transfer to Georgia. “It does seem to really be West Coast-oriented, for whatever reason.”
At Cal State Fullerton, which jettisoned football after 1992, alumni, community members and current students united in November 2007 to form the Bring Back Titan Football Committee, which is devising a referendum for students to vote on reinstating the sport.
“There are always grassroots movements,” says Mel Franks, an associate athletics director at Cal State Fullerton, which produced Hall of Famer Marcus Allen’s little brother, CFL prodigy Damon Allen, whose 72,381 career passing yards are the most in pro football history. “But it’s just such an expensive sport. Even among the BCS schools, not all of them make money on football.”
Sonoma State nixed its 27-year-old program following 1996 after reportedly spending $320,000 a year on football while bringing in just $30,000.
“It’s just hard for us to do with our budget here,” says Brandon Bronzan, an assistant athletics director at Sonoma State, the alma mater of 11-time NFL Pro Bowler Larry Allen. “The question I get more than anything else is, ‘Why did we drop football?’ I’d say a lot of people miss it.”
Like dominoes, when one West Coast school dropped, others became more likely to ensue because they had to look outside the state for opponents, further worsening the monetary woes – felt not just by CSUs.
Pacific, which was coached from 1933 to 1946 by visionary Amos Alonzo Stagg (of whom Notre Dame legend Knute Rockne said “all football” derived), last played in 1995.
Another private school, FCS San Diego, has resorted to playing in the Pioneer Football League. Its eight other members hail from Florida, North Carolina, Ohio, Kentucky, Indiana and Iowa.
To stay closer to home in non-conference play this season, the Toreros scheduled Azusa Pacific – the only NAIA program in California (there are 95 in the country), and one that, according to its associate athletics director Gary Pine, traveled more in 2006 than any college outfit in the nation.
While California has nine schools continuing in Division III, Humboldt State is its sole Division II member (there are 147 in the country).
“You don’t really have a choice as far as who you can play,” says Matt Monroe, associate media relations director at Cal State Northridge – a 2001 casualty – where future Stanford helmsman Jack Elway began his head-coaching career in 1976. “It’s just the nature of the beast with the state’s budget crisis.”
Naturally, large-market teams felt the fiscal obstacles hardest.
“At Cal Poly, a lot of our students live right here, and the community is right here,” Cone says. “We’re kind of the only show, so we benefit more than if you’re in the L.A. area where people may identify with UCLA or USC even if they didn’t go there.”
At some schools, football has resurfaced in club form, as it did at UC Santa Barbara from 1986 to 1991 after being cut in 1971.
Students, however, eventually lost interest, says Bill Mahoney, a Gauchos assistant athletics director.
“I sense a little more indifference to football on the West Coast,” he says.
A similar trend took place at Cal Tech, which last played in 1977, before a club manifestation lasted from 1978 to 1993.
“There’s been a T-shirt for sale in our bookstore that says, ‘Cal Tech football: undefeated since 1993,'” says Wendell Jack, Cal Tech’s athletics director. “That’s kind of our tongue-in-cheek way of looking at things.”
Jack, who pointed to the lack of an NFL team in Los Angeles, shared Mahoney’s sentiment that despite the occasional ground swell, Californians may just not care.
“It’s kind of a mess, from my perspective,” he says. “In Ohio, Pennsylvania or Wisconsin, if they talked about dropping football, someone would probably die. There just seems to be apathy here. In California, there’s so much more to do, it’s just different.”
Pine says a possible saving grace could be students’ devotion.
“I would like to think we’ve hit rock bottom,” he says. “In (some students’) minds, having a football program legitimizes their college experience, and can make it feel like a USC or a UCLA.”
Cone concurred.
“A football program is a little unique in that there’s a whole game-day experience you don’t necessarily have with other sports,” she says. “The band does this, the student section does that. It certainly adds to student life and culture in some unique ways.”
For all those lost, it’s uncertain how many more teams – or players – could fall off the map.
“It’s a shame,” says Dennis Farrell, commissioner of the Big West Conference for 16 years. “There are a lot of outstanding (high school) players in the state of California with nowhere to play at the collegiate level. It’s a concern when the largest state in the country is down to this many teams.”