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Post by AztecWilliam on Dec 24, 2009 12:23:44 GMT -8
Northeastern and Hofstra have dropped intercollegiate football. Both schools had fielded teams for over 70 years. Two more nails in the coffin of football due to financial problems. Unless something is not done, those problems, plus the mounting effects of Title IX, will kill many more programs. We may be left with just a few dozen big name schools plus a pretty good number of non-scholarship programs in Div III and the NAIA.
My solution is to start a division of collegiate football in which all teams are limited to just 32 players plus a coaching staff of 5 positions (HC + 4 assistants). Each half would be 45 minutes, with running clock (except the last 5 minutes of each half). Four officials only, which was typical for decades. Allow schools in this division to play junior colleges or even service teams (I'll bet that Camp Pendleton could field a team, especially if the event were some sort of charitable fund-raiser) to fill out their schedules. For that matter, such schools could play regular Div III schools; it would be no worse if, say, UCSD had such a team and played Univ. of Redlands than if Cal Poly plays Wisconsin. A step up in class that would be a challenge but not a regular practice.
Anyway, that's my plan to allow schools to have a football team on a budget. Such a team could easily be balanced by a couple of women's teams, perhaps soccer and la crosse.
AzWm
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Post by Aztec89 on Jun 2, 2010 6:16:54 GMT -8
Not feasible.
32 players? What you are describing in like an Intramural, or Club sport program. Lots of 2 way players. Complete lack of organization. What promising high school kids would want to play at that level?
Scrub City.
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Post by AztecWilliam on Jun 2, 2010 18:33:14 GMT -8
Not feasible. 32 players? What you are describing in like an Intramural, or Club sport program. Lots of 2 way players. Complete lack of organization. What promising high school kids would want to play at that level? Scrub City. You pretty much got the idea. Well, the lack of organization part is wrong, but otherwise you are correct. My modest proposal is a way to encourage the creation of football at colleges that cannot now and probably never will be able to afford football under the present circumstances. You are particularly on target with the two-way player comment. I remember reading in one of the sports magazines some years back an article which made a proposal to limit the cost of big time football. Not as radical as my plan, but somewhat along the same lines. The writer suggested limiting teams to, as I recall, 66 players. Now an FBS team can have 85 on scholarship plus 20 walk-ons. The author I refer to indicated that some players probably would go both ways. He added that plenty of young players would like that just fine. After all, we see two-way players all the time at the H.S. level. (Furthermore, it has only been since about the 1960s that unlimited substitution has made two-platoon football the norm.) Furthermore, college football teams before about 1950 routinely had far fewer players than they do now. In a SI article about Iowa's Heisman winner NIle Kinnick it was stated that the 1939 Hawkeye team had only 26 players. I would say that many college teams in the '30s and '40s had about 40-60 players. Heck, get 22 kids together on a field and you can have a football game, right! Colleges had fewer coaches, too. I read a football book by (as I recall) Biggie Munn, successful H.C. of Mich. St. At the front of the book was a photo of the coach and his assistants. Five men in all! Even given the somewhat less complex strategies of the early '50s, I would suggest that the Spartans of those days were not disorganized because there were only five coaches. The idea of my proposal is to allow there to be some kind of football enjoyed by players and students at schools that now have none. Would it be at the level of NCAA scholarship schools? No. But it would still be worthwhile. It would feature . . . gasp! . . . actual student athletes. And it would not be much different, I would guess, from the sport as played at Univ. of LaVerne, Whittier College, Southern Oregon, Kentucky Christian, and other Div III and NAIA schools. I've mentioned before the rather long list of colleges in California that have dropped football in the past several decades (with no new programs contemplated to offset those losses). But I should add that many, many other schools have given up on the sport across the country: Evansville, Wichita St., Tampa, Western Washington, Brooklyn College, Boston Univ., Detroit, Denver U., etc. The cost of football is just going through the roof. Schools at the highest level with stadiums holding 80,000 plus with ticket prices from $40.00 on up and fans eager to buy them will do okay. The have-nots barely hold on. Or not even that. Unless a new division of college football with limited players and coaches is started, we will see a lot more casualties. AzWm |
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Post by k5james on Jun 2, 2010 18:57:55 GMT -8
Wrong board
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Post by E31-Aztec on Jun 3, 2010 7:21:37 GMT -8
aztecwilliam, please go see the intramural co-ed flag football leagues on campus.
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Post by AztecWilliam on Jun 4, 2010 21:24:09 GMT -8
aztecwilliam, please go see the intramural co-ed flag football leagues on campus. I am familiar with flag football. That is not at all what I am proposing. (Though there is nothing wrong with flag football.) What I have in mind is tackle football with limited numbers of players and some rule modifications but otherwise pretty much like what we are used to. Would it be on a level with scholarship leagues? Of course not. But, then, teams from very small colleges (NAIA members are good examples) are nothing like NCAA Divison II and higher. Hey, it's just a thought. Maybe a crazy one. AzWm |
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Post by monty on Jun 5, 2010 6:52:25 GMT -8
Some football programs need to die.
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Post by AztecWilliam on Jun 6, 2010 10:26:09 GMT -8
Some football programs need to die. Perhaps. But when all you have is programs dying, something is wrong. Either the sport just sucks and popular support for it is declining (you could say that such is the case with baseball) or else the costs, driven up by the boundless competition between the relatively few rich programs, represent a stacked deck from which only a few schools can draws kings and aces. There is an interesting sociological aspect to this, too. Several programs have been started (or restarted, as in the case of Georgia Southern), but most of them have been in the South. (And quite a few of them are non-scholarship programs in which the players really have to pay their own way to play.) We are all aware of South Florida, which had no football team before 1997 yet now boast BCS membership. In fact, I would say that Florida has far outstripped California as the football capitol of America. As far as California is concerned, the culture of most colleges here is ambivalent at best or down right hostile toward intercollegiate athletics. Since football is the crown jewel of college sports, and since it requires the most resources to succeed, it is a favorite target of the anti-athletic faction. Unless something is done to lower the cost of fielding a scholarship football team, we will, eventually, see many more schools drop the sport. My ghoul pool guesses would be Sac State and San Jose State among California schools. That would be, in my opinion, a real shame. But, then, college football is my passion, so any views I express on this subject are decidedly not objective. AzWm |
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Post by goaztecs on Jun 13, 2010 20:01:39 GMT -8
The solution with title 9 is to make football exempt from the scholarship count. Just match up the other sports equally in scholarship numbers. Its ridiculous to have to match up the 85 football scholarships for Div 1.
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Post by aztecwin on Jun 14, 2010 12:09:12 GMT -8
The solution with title 9 is to make football exempt from the scholarship count. Just match up the other sports equally in scholarship numbers. Its ridiculous to have to match up the 85 football scholarships for Div 1. That plus Cal Now. The problem is where can you find someone with the leadership ability and the interest in taking this issue on? |
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Post by goaztecs on Jun 16, 2010 17:04:07 GMT -8
The solution with title 9 is to make football exempt from the scholarship count. Just match up the other sports equally in scholarship numbers. Its ridiculous to have to match up the 85 football scholarships for Div 1. That plus Cal Now. The problem is where can you find someone with the leadership ability and the interest in taking this issue on? Ya good point. You probably can't find anyone. |
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