The Ogden City Mall has been a favorite hangout lately for large, muscular young men in letter jackets and jerseys, but these are not your garden variety mall rats. These are Weber State football players. Sitting behind a folding table in a vacant store in the upper level of the mall, they ask passers-by to help their team - ticket pledges, individual tickets, donations, anything.
Hey, buddy, can you spare a half-million dollars?They've been here since Thanksgiving weekend, and they'll remain here, day and night, two or three players at a time, until Christmas. SAVE WILDCAT FOOTBALL, says one of the signs. On Saturday Weber cheerleaders performed a few routines at the mall to draw attention to the cause.
The Wildcats may or may not have played their last football game. The team has been drowning in red ink for years, and last month the administration, tired of paying the bill and faced with increasingly tight finances, said that it was ready to drop the program.
The Wildcats and their supporters, meanwhile, are trying everything to save the team. Football players hawk T-shirts and ticket pledges during Weber basketball games. Coach Dave Arslanian is on the phone and in meetings nonstop, trying to hustle support. Weber students go door to door trying to sell tickets. But the Wildcats might be fighting a losing battle.
"Where do you get $500,000 in three weeks?" asks Arslanian.
That's about what it will take to save the program, and that's a lot of bake sales. A decision on the future of the team is expected next week.
No football at a university? No cheerleaders, no autumn Saturdays in the stadium, no marching bands? Is this possible in America?
Before you decide how you feel about all this, you should rid yourself of one common misconception: that college football teams turn a profit. In athletic parlance, football is called a "revenue-producing sport" - but not a "profit-producing sport." According to one published report, football is losing money at 454 of 524 NCAA schools. Most schools lose upwards of $500,000 per year.
Weber State, a Division 1-AA team, is one of them. For years the Wildcats have operated in the Red Zone, but they have been heavily subsidized by the university. For six years, from 1988-1989 to June of 1994, the Weber football team has had annual net losses of $748,000, $821,000, $851,000, $885,000, $833,000, and $907,000, respectively. This season the team generated $168,000, but cost well over $1 million.
Given Weber's financial history, many football supporters wonder why the school is pushing the panic button now, so suddenly. After all, as Athletic Director Tom Stewart says, "This problem didn't just pop up over night." But it's been heading for a showdown for years.
Paul Thompson has been buying time since he became the school's president three years ago, trying to keep the football team out of the red with state money. But the program's problems have only worsened, if anything, and Thompson has been told to wean the athletic department from its money habit.
Alarmed by Weber's expenditures of $1.1 million of state funds on athletics - more than any other state institution - the state board of regents told Thompson to reduce that figure to fall in line with other schools. He cut $200,000 of those funds from next year's budget - "the minimum I can get away with." Thompson also was told by the institutional council to cut $480,000 in discretionary funds that Weber was spending on the athletic department. Thompson settled on a cut of $320,000 for the coming year.
The bottom line: Weber's athletic department budget will be cut by some $520,000 in 1994.
Informed of the cuts, Stewart didn't make the usual knee-jerk reaction of most athletic directors by issuing instant cutbacks in the so-called minor sports. He decided it was time for the holy cow, football - the sport that consumes 36 percent of the athletic department's total operating costs and 22 percent of its salaries - to face the music. Stewart recommended severe cuts in football, but when the idea was presented to various student, faculty and administrative groups on campus, the consensus was to cut the sport completely rather than scale it down. Do it right, or not at all.
"I may be putting my career on the line - an athletic director who didn't support football," says Stewart. "But I want to do what's best for the school, and I support the president 100 percent. I can't go to the minor sports anymore. Look at (track coach) Chick Hislop. He's busted his butt for years and done a great job. He was just chosen to be a distance coach for the 1996 Olympic team. That's fantastic. I can't tell those people that their sport is not important.
"Everyone says, drop a minor sport or cut back, but they're running on a shoestring budget right now. You can't avoid football. Football is the one that is taking the biggest amount of money, and we're not getting the return."
It will take more than signatures to save the football team. It will take signatures accompanied by ticket pledges and/or money. Thompson told one save-the-team gathering that Weber supporters must join the booster club, demonstrate an ability to raise $500,000 in ticket pledges, donations and/or a raise in student fees, and show that this can continue every year.
"This is your chance," he said to occasional booing. "If you want to promote football, do your damndest. We've been busting our butts for three years."
What ultimately will be decided this month is how important the very game of football is to a school, to education. Is it worth the huge sums of money the game costs for recruiting, uniforms, travel, coaches, scholarships, etc., and if so, at what price is it not worth it? In these days of gender equity, rising costs in education, endless tax hikes and increasingly tighter financial constraints, where does football fit in?
Long Beach State and Cal Fullerton have dropped their football programs in recent years. Others preceded them; others will follow.
"The university feels like it's carried the bulk of this burden (supporting football) long enough," says Arslanian. "I don't argue with that. What we need to do is decide how important football is to the scope of the university."
Apparently, not very important. Attendance plummeted from an average of 8,000 per game over the last 20 years to 4,800 this year, despite the Wildcats' third consecutive winning season. Of Weber's 14,500 students, only 2,000 showed up at games.
Many blame Weber's financial woes on the sudden drop in attendance, but that, say school officials, accounts for a loss of only $40,000 or $50,000. Still, if the decision to continue or cut football is based on its importance to the university, attendance certainly means something.
"Attendance isn't everything," says one athletic department official from a neighboring university. "What about the publicity and exposure football brings to a school? Weber wouldn't be on the sports page anymore."
But Stewart wonders if notoriety is worth the continuous debt.
"Gender equity and financial conditions are the top concerns of college presidents right now," says Stewart. "It's a problem at most universities. Finances are getting much tighter."
Particularly for 1-AA schools, which, unlike their 1-A brothers, can't count on a share of bowl, TV and College Football Association money. These days they can't even schedule a 1-A opponent to secure a big gate guarantee. With the current backlash against soft schedules, most big-time 1-A programs refuse to schedule 1-AA teams.
"I tried to schedule Nebraska, that's how crazy I am," says Stewart. "They said no way."
So the Wildcats, like all 1-AA teams, really have only three sources of revenue: private donations, ticket sales and government/university subsidies.
Financial problems notwithstanding, tradition dies hard. The Wildcats have played football for more than 100 years, first as an academy, then as a junior college, then as a four-year college and lately as a university. Nobody is fighting harder to save the team than Arslanian. He watched his father, Sark, coach the Wildcats through eight seasons and played defensive back for him during two of those seasons. Five years ago, Dave became head coach, and three years later he hired his brother Paul as a defensive coordinator.
"Others in the profession have asked me why I'm fighting so hard to save this thing," says Arslanian. "I'm marketable somewhere else. But I've got a staff of coaches and 80 players counting on me . . . We're fighting for our lives."
Even before the current crisis, the Wildcats already were running a frugal program. They travel to road games by bus, gauging distance by the number of videos they watch en route. A road game in Reno, Nev., is a "four-movie trip" - or 10 hours. They return home immediately after the game, arriving in Ogden in the wee hours, stiff and sore from hours of sitting.
"If we flew to Reno we would spend half our guarantee right there," says Arlsanian.
The Wildcats recruit heavily in Utah simply because in-state scholarships and campus visits are cheaper, and there is pressure to sign every recruit who visits Weber's campus to make the most of a limited recruiting budget.
Given the sudden turn of events last month, what Arslanian wants most is time to solve the team's problems. Among other things, he believes that scheduling games against 1-A instate schools Utah State and Utah would save his program, but the latter are unwilling.
"It would create local interest and give us a (gate) guarantee," says Arslanian. "And it costs us nothing to get to the game. They have scheduled teams comparable to us and have chosen not to schedule us. I'm going to do what I can to convince those schools."
For now, Weber coaches and players are on hold. In the next few days they will decide whether to remain at Weber or search for another school. "Everyone's in shock," says linebacker Rob Hitchcock. "We're just waiting to see what happens and what our options are."
"(Arslanian) is remaining positive," says lineman Obie Spanic. "He believes the money is out there. If people want this team, then it's all up to them."
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ADDITIONAL INFORMATION
Weber's red zone
Annual net losses
1988-89 748,000
1989-90 821,000
1990-91 851,000
1991-92 885,000
1992-93 833,000
*1993-94 907,000
*Projected loss. Budget year ends in June of 1994.