Game-Time Decision
Student reluctance leads to an ETSU punt on the issue of a revived football program
By Drew Ruble
Five years ago, tiny Southeastern Louisiana University in Hammond, La., revived a scholarship football program that had lain dormant for 18 seasons. The impact? According to a study performed by Southeastern's Business Research Center, profound. Based on direct revenues from the program, auxiliary expenditures by home game attendees and estimates of "ripple" effects based on generally accepted economic multipliers, the impact was approximately $8.3 million in the first year.
Reviving football has been a persistent topic of conversation at East Tennessee State University and its home base of Johnson City ever since President Paul Stanton shut the program down in 2003, citing financial difficulties. Most Washington County residents, including Stanton, would like to see football return to ETSU. But a plethora of financial considerations teamed with student body opposition has so far kept that from happening. A careful study of the facts and figures surrounding the debate has made most local business folks sympathetic to the reasons for not having it. That said, sentiment still exists that not having football is a missed economic opportunity for the entire local community.
A Red Zone Offense
When Stanton came to ETSU in 1997, he says the university was diverting $1 million from academic pursuits to maintain the school's athletics program. In 1999, he put together a task force of 30 community/university representatives to look at all athletic programs and advise him on what to do. They came back with the message that football was the problem, and concluded that within the next five years ETSU would need to raise an additional $800,000 to 900,000 from donations to remain solvent.
"What we generated over the next few years averaged $27,000 in donations, which is a huge difference," says Stanton. "After a lot of consternation and anxiety, I announced the end of the football program at our foundation meeting in May of 2003."
In 2006, a group called the Buc Football & Friends Foundation (BF&FF), which had formed in the aftermath of Stanton's decision, formally lobbied Stanton to consider reviving the program. Stanton agreed and formed another task force—one that included student government representation—and set a study in motion. The group found that bringing the program back was now a $1.8 million per year proposition. On top of that, in order to comply fully with Title 9 (which the program had not been fully funding previously), an additional $2.5 million would be needed to add at least three women's programs, increasing the total cost to $4.3 million.
Simultaneously, student surveys strongly indicated that if a student referendum were held asking for support of an increase in athletic fees to fund revival of the football program, it would pass. (Approval of the Tennessee Board of Regents, ETSU's governing body, would also be required.) The proposed fee increase would have generated a little over $2.5 million.
With those new facts in hand, the university sent out nearly 70,000 letters of solicitation to alumni and friends indicating that nearly $1 million of the total $4.3 million re-start cost would have to come from donors per year. Between advertising support, sponsorships, ticket and merchandise sales, the university figured it could generate the additional $800,000 needed to meet the $4.3 million program cost. But the student vote—not required but which Stanton told students he would hold and support—went the opposite direction.
"Everybody, including myself, believed that the referendum the student government wanted would be approved," Stanton says. "When it came to the students from a survey saying they would pay it to students knowing they would have to pay for it, they reneged on it."
Contested Call
BF&FF president Jerry Robertson blames ETSU's faculty for the reversal of fortune. "During that period of time between the survey and the vote, the faculty worked against it, took class time to talk about how we were going to lose our pencils and tablets and wouldn't have any light bulbs if you vote for this," Robertson relates. "Football was the bogeyman." Stanton responds that a departmental survey showed 80% of the faculty didn't want football to return but couldn't confirm that faculty lobbied in classrooms. "I heard some rumors that they had," Stanton says. "I have to believe some of that was out there. And it would not be totally unexpected."
Robertson questions why Stanton ever felt the need to hold or adhere to the student body vote on the subject when it is his prerogative to increase fees as he sees fit. Stanton replies, "I kind of look at it as a tax. If the students don't want a tax, I'm not going to cram it down their throats." Additionally, Stanton says the sentiment of the Board of Regents, unlike other governing bodies in other states, has been not to put athletics on the backs of students who have seen tuition costs rise on average around 8% each of the last 10 years. "I was told by more than one regent that unless the students supported it in their referendum, they would not support it at the board level," Stanton says.
Stanton now believes it will take another four years until the current crop of ETSU students graduate before the issue of reviving the football program will again be a possibility. Robertson says the general feeling of the people in the Washington County area is that "probably nothing is going to be done until the administration changes." (If that's the case, then football fans can take heart—Stanton recently announced he would retire in March 2009.)
Going for Broke?
So is Washington County missing out on the fruits of economic impact by having a football program at ETSU? Robertson points to examples of other schools like Appalachian State University in Boone, N.C., which revived its program, recently toppled Division I powerhouse the University of Michigan and has grossed millions of dollars on increased student applications, alumni money, even T-shirt sales. Stanton's view of the potential local economic impact is far less grand. "If you had it and if you were winning like Appalachian State is doing—and I take my hat off to them—it is generating dollars for them," Stanton says. "But in the days when Appalachian State had not come up to real competitive advantage, they weren't doing well, either."
John J. Siegfried, professor of economics at Vanderbilt University in Nashville where he teaches antitrust economics and the economics of sports, concurs. "Without football, more local residents will play golf, go to movies, etc., on Saturday afternoons in the Fall, and expenditures on those activities will offset any loss of football revenues," Siegfried says. "The short answer to almost all economic impact questions is that the impacts are not nearly as large as is usually argued because there are decent substitutes for most activities." So for now, at least, football fans in Washington County will just have to find something else to do.
This article appeared in the June 2008 issue of Business Tennessee Magazine.
Diplomacy aside, you make a very strong case in favor of Mercer football becoming a reality. I'm interested to see what Mr. Shirley's response will be (assuming that he does respond). 
