The next 60 days will determine whether Weber State University has a football team next year.
The need to trim $500,000 from the athletic department budget has put the football program on life support."There's a lot of pain in the athletic department this week. Tom Stewart's (athletic director) not sleeping very well. Dave Arslanian (football coach) is upset," Weber President Paul H. Thompson said Friday.
Arslanian was contacted Friday afternoon by the Deseret News, but he did not want to comment about the situation until he had a chance to talk it over with Thompson and Stewart. Arslanian indicated he knew cost-cutting measures were being discussed, but that he was caught by surprise that the whole football program may be dropped.
Stewart was at a meeting in Colorado and unavailable for comment.
The basic problem is that revenues are not even coming close to offsetting expenses.
While the Wildcats have been performing fairly well on the field - they finished with a 7-4 record this season, 6-5 in 1992 and 8-4 in 1991, for the first time since the 1960s that the school has put together three straight winning seasons - few fans are supporting them.
Average attendance is only 4,800 per game at a stadium that seats 17,000.
As such, the football program lost more than $800,000 this year, said Thompson. Expenses exceeded $1 million while revenues amounted to only $168,000 - $84,000 from ticket sales and another $84,000 from road-game fees, broadcast rights, concession sales and minor revenue sources.
Figures provided by the State Board of Regents last year showedthat more than a third of Weber State's $3 million-plus athletic budget is paid for by state funds. Student fees, booster-club donations and subsidies pay for most of the rest, with gate receipts paying for only about 10 percent.
Since September, a strategic planning committee has been looking at all of Weber State's programs and concluded that athletics are being subsidized way too much. It recommended that the subsidy be reduced by $500,000.
Thompson told the faculty senate Thursday that "mounting financial pressures" will force the university to reduce subsidies by the $500,000 recommended.
The money can be saved by cutting the football budget in half, dropping the sport completely or making 15 percent across-the-board reductions in all 14 intercollegiate sports budgets.
Thompson is against making across-the-board reductions in all sports because that would "put all of them at a disadvantage" in competing against other schools. Also, Thompson wonders if cutting the football budget in half would be fair to the program. It would seem that football will either survive intact or be eliminated.
What Thompson and other Weber State officials will be doing the next 60 days is determining if there are ways to increase revenue $500,000 annually. If an acceptable long-term solution can be found, then the football program will be saved. If not, it will be scrapped.
Thompson notes that, "We've been trying to do that (increase revenue) for years" without success.
"What I'm asking the community and the university is, how important is football? Can we find the support to keep it going?"
Thompson is not interested in a short-term reprieve, such as the one that occurred at Long Beach State several years ago. The football program was saved with a basic one-time fund-raiser and then folded last year anyway.
Thompson will be meeting with students, boosters and donors to see if there is an acceptable solution. Will students be willing to have a fee increase to help fund football, Thompson wonders.
While Thompson was vice president over athletics at Brigham Young University, Dave Checketts did a study for BYU that showed that eight of nine top athletic programs in the country were losing money. Only Notre Dame, out of a group that included Michigan, UCLA, North Carolina, Duke, Stanford, Arizona State, Penn State and Virginia, made money. Even Michigan, which sells out a 105,000-seat stadium for football, had to be subsidized. It had an $18 million budget and spent $20 million, Thompson said.
He said a number of other schools will be facing the same sort of decision Weber State is fairly soon.