The Blazers found out Sunday they weren’t one of the five Conference USA teams invited to a bowl game. UAB President Ray Watts announced Tuesday that he was shutting down the football program, primarily because of the financial commitment it would take to keep the program competitive. The university is also eliminating bowling and rifle.
The bowl snub came days after the 6-6 team became bowl eligible for the first time in a decade and only the second time in its history and put an end to the players’ dreams of putting on UAB jerseys one last time.
UAB is the first major Division Football Bowl sub-division football program to shut down since the University of Pacific in 1955, but it won’t be the last. The operating costs have just become too high for schools like this with a limited fan base and donor support. An outside consulting group was brought in to determine whether the school’s continued attempts to keep a football program afloat in an athletic department that lost $17 million in 2013. They determined the escalation of the arms race in FBS football and the move by the Power Conference schools to offer cost of education scholarships was just too rich for the school’s blood. Without network TV support, there was a danger of the program falling farther and farther in debt and putting a greater burden on student fees and the university subsidies to fund the sport. The school simply decided it was time to cut its losses and the money could be better spent elsewhere..
“The fiscal realities we face — both from an operating and a capital investment standpoint — are starker than ever and demand that we take decisive action for the greater good of the Athletic Department and UAB,” Watts said. “As we look at the evolving landscape of NCAA football, we see expenses only continuing to increase. When considering a model that best protects the financial future and prominence of the Athletic Department, football is simply not sustainable. The gap is just too wide.”
UAB already subsidizes $20 million of its roughly $30 million annual Athletic Department operating budget, which is the fifth largest budget and subsidy in Conference USA. That equates to a $100 million existing subsidy from UAB to the Athletic Department in the next five years. In the new NCAA landscape over that same time period, the difference in scenarios in which UAB eliminates football or maintains a competitive Conference USA program is an additional $49 million. After those first five years, operating costs would only continue to increase.
Sunday, the university took steps to explain its decision with a Q and A posted on the school’s web site. The most telling response:
“To invest an additional 50 million to keep football, on top of the the $100 million UAB will already invest in athletics over the next five years, we woulde have to redirect funds from areas like education, research and student services. There was a critical decision for the long-term financial health of the institution and the athletics department.”
By eliminating football, UAB contends it will be better positioned to invest in programs where the institution can be competitive on a conference and even a national level. Funds from discontinued programs will be redirected to more fully support UAB’s priority sports and build those into championship programs. Top priorities for UAB are to maintain UAB’s NCAA Division I status and remain in Conference USA, while providing assistance to the student athletes and coaches whose athletic careers at UAB end with the season. UAB has said it will honor players’ scholarships and coaches’ contracts.
This was a courageous decision made in a hostile region where football is king. Not every school should strive to become a corporate giant like Alabama, Ohio State or Texas, where schools are raking in $50 million dollar profits and paying coaches upwards to $5 million.
Too many FBS schools are just trying to survive. A recent survey of public institutions showed that 26 athletic departments from the group of five lesser conferences are running at larger deficits than UAB, The so called national branding the UAB football team temporarily achieved by playing Ohio State close last year in Columbus or playing Mississippi State on the SEC Network isn’t worth the gallons of red ink in the overall athletic budget.
In reality, football never had a chance here, anyway.
UAB started football in 1996, producing an ambitious promotional campaign complete with banners that said, “We’re here to stay.”
But the last thing SEC goliath Alabama — the giant state school located 50 miles away in Tuscaloosa– wanted was another recruiting competitor in its own backyard. The two institutions may share a board of trustees and a medical school, but the Tide had no interest in seeing the Blazer succeed in big time athletics ever since the late Gene Bartow left his job as UCLA’s head basketball coach to found UAB’s basketball program in 1978 and refused to schedule UAB in basketball or football, after Bartow, the Blazers’ AD, announced his intentions to put together a football program in 1991.
The Alabama Board of Trustees, which was and still is dominated with Alabama graduates with Alabama interests, blocked UAB’s attempts to move out of aging Legion Field into a new stadium that was convenient to the student body and nixed a deal for UAB to hire Jimbo Fisher, who has since become the coach at current BCS national champion Florida State. Crowds of less than 10,000 were not unusual for a team that had only three winning seasons and played in only one bowl during its 19 years of existence.
When the school canceled football, there was a predictable outrage on campus from the students and the players, some of whom claimed the Alabama Board of Trustees were behind a plan to destroy the program. There were protests and emotional face to face meetings with Watts. But the decision is final.
This is just one more sad tale of the growing gap between the haves and have nots in college sports.
This country is obsessed with football. UAB took the lead of a recent trend of universities starting football programs from scratch with the plan to get to Division I as soon as possible, and capitalize on the PR and financial benefits that come with a major college football program. Several other universities like East Tennessee State, Kennesaw State, Mercer, Houston Baptist, Stetson, Charlotte, UT San Antonio and Georgia State that are in or are about to join the Football Bowl Subdivision have started football programs since UAB did. .
All of them, not so coincidentally, are located in the deep South, and all felt they had a chance to succeed because of the religous fervor surrounding the sport there and the fertile recruiting in the region. But they are discovering it is costly to field a competitive FBS program. They all have losing records against fellow FBS schools, and all receive substantial subsidies in order to keep their athletic departments afloat. They’ve had trouble attracting financial support, most likely because most football fans in the South are already loyal to traditional SEC and ACC teams. As the Big 5 power conferences start to crank up the financial pressure, it’s possible that some of these programs could eventually join UAB posting out-of-business signs.
