Just for fun, here is an excerpt from the NCAA’s official website describing one of it’s member institutions. We have edited out the school’s name and city for effect. See if you can’t guess what college the NCAA is profiling.
For years, XYZ University struggled to shed its commuter college reputation by building dorms and a student center, hoping to draw more activity to the sleepy downtown campus.
The bookstore had trouble selling T-shirts. On evenings and Saturdays, the campus was a ghost town. Homecoming – held in the spring, not the fall – was a joke among students and alumni.
Sound familiar? Could you have easily substituted XYZ University with Cal State Fullerton and have it be a spot on description to the campus life you see today? Sadly, many reading this will agree.
Unfortunately for Fullerton fans, students and alumni, this description will continue to be a reality until the Cal State Fullerton administration decides to bring back Titan Football. Fortunately for Georgia State, the above stanza USED to be a valid description of their campus. That description no longer applies. Why? Football, plain and simple.
The above quote was taken and edited slightly from this article: NCAA.com – Georgia State Campus Transformed By Football
…The blueprint for bringing back Titan Football has been laid at the feet of the CSUF administration…
In a previous post on BringBackTitanFootball.com, we told you Georgia State Provides the Blueprint to Bring Back Titan Football. This post was written back in April 2008 before Georgia State had played a down. We made the comparisons between Cal State Fullerton and Georgia State because both campus environments and student populations closely mirrored each other. But despite the warnings of “this is a great idea but in light of a poor economic environment is just bad timing”, Georgia State pushed forward to bring football on campus. Has the investment in football paid off at Georgia State? You be the judge. At Georgia State:
- Alumni association membership has nearly doubled to 3,300 in seven months.
- New student applications hit a record 12,091 for this fall.
- Donations are rolling in – $2.5 million so far just for football.
Hello? Dr. Gordon? Are you listening?
If you don’t believe the report coming from the NCAA that football has transformed Georgia State’s campus, check out this video from the Associated Press.
The blueprint for bringing back Titan Football has been laid at the feet of the CSUF administration. A feasibility report was submitted to the Athletic Department and shared with the President’s office. They have chosen to ignore it and focus on other plans and ideas saying it is too costly and too expensive considering today’s recessionary economic climate.
Cal State Fullerton can make all the excuses its wants and can choose to ignore that bringing back Titan Football would drastically change the current campus atmosphere. The real question is, “How long will fans, students and alumni have to wait before the CSUF administration wakes up and looks to the success story that is the Georgia State Football program”?
Close minded and short sighted. Not only is the bad economy a perfect opportunity, (employment, lower costs, etc.), but we would be the only game in town. NFL and several other CSU campuses may beat us to the punch. Way to go Gordon.
I don’t see Caltech, MIT, the University of Chicago, Carnegie Mellon, the Claremont Colleges, etc., worrying about sports. When you think of UC Berkeley or Stanford (particularly Berkeley), even though they DO have name sports teams, do most people think of their sports first or their academic reputations first? If you took away their sports teams, would anyone really change their opinions of those 2 schools? No to both. UCLA rates below both.
Personally, I would NOT want to go to UCLA precisely because of its sports hype. Though it is allegedly a good school academically, which is what I look at first, I am turned off by all the jock attitude and expense of UCLA sports. (Want to know who are the most expensive employees of UC? Not professors, nor even overpaid administrators — it’s a coach who is number 1 and several coaches who are in the top 10!) If you cut UCLA sports, would its academic reputation suffer? It might even improve. How many of those UCLA athletes actually graduate? Precisely because of all the sports hype, I actually downgrade UCLA academically over other UCs. I see UCB as superior by far to UCLA.
Other than working the lard off our overweight society, I see little value to team sports vis-a-vis academics in a college education, or in a college’s reputation. I submit that schools actually get lower quality students because of sports, and the colleges’ reputations actually suffer because they gain reputations as party schools.
Rocket scientists could care less about team sports. College isn’t supposed to be a country club. It’s supposed to be about getting an education so you can get a better job and contribute to an ever improving society. A privileged party college life at state expense is not the function of a public university. I don’t want my taxes supporting that.
If it comes down to paying for team sports or using that money to supply small scholarships to 500 or 1,000 needy, academically promising students, I support the latter.
(btw, it is not true that anyone with a 2.0 can get into CSUF, though, unfortunately, we have too many students taking remedial math and English classes who belong at a JC, not CSUF. But that is the fault of CSUF’s admissions process; there are a few thousand qualified students waiting to take their place. And the GPA requirement for out-of-OC transfer students is now 3.7 (A-, not C), yet we waste money building dormitories for OC residents as part of “college life”?)
I think what we are seeing here is a bunch of whiners who were not good enough to get into these name party schools, so want to impose their values on the rest of us and waste our money cloning superfluous (and ultimately inferior) programs we just can’t afford. Ultimately, no intelligent employer makes a hiring decision based on a school’s sports teams. Sports are NOT going to increase the true value of any college degree. College is not a country club. “Campus life” and ra ra “school spirit” are peripheral activities, not the primary or “core” (to use the administration’s newspeak term) function of a college education. Anyone interested in that can join a frat or sorority and pay for it themselves. People looking for an in loco parentis country club environment should stop wasting space at CSU. We need the space for students who actually want an education to improve their lot in life, not a place to keep warm for 4 years between high school and their delayed adulthood. The CSU system was intended as a college for people who don’t come from bourgeois backgrounds, who maybe weren’t the best in high school, but who are still good enough to benefit from a college education.
I don’t think Steven Mihaylo was worried about sports when he donated $30M to the business school at CSUF. I don’t think Joseph Clayes III was thinking of sports when he donated $5M from his estate for the performing arts center at CSUF. I am more proud of both those organizations than I would be of a football team, even though I’ve got nothing to do with performing arts. Performing arts requires real skill, and I think the cutbacks there are more of a shame than not having something so common as a football team.
If you prefer to go to Fresno State or Boise State because of their sports teams, transfer. If you think SDSU has name recognition because of its sports teams, you might want to notice that it is one of the few CSUs that offers joint doctoral degrees (and not only worthless, parasitical Ed.D degrees). I never heard of any positive correlation between sports teams and academic reputations, nor do I believe such proof exists; it’s urban myth in some people’s minds. Cal Poly Pomona and Cal Poly San Luis Obisbo do not have superb reputations because of sports teams, nor did they gain their reputations because of sports teams. They gained their reputations through superb academic programs and superb graduates.
Anyone who thinks sports is going to raise the value of a CSUF degree has got their heads screwed on funny and their priorities twisted. (You could say those are the people most in need of an education, and who seem to least benefit from it.) The only thing that is going to increase the value of a CSUF degree is the quality of output — its graduates. The reputation and recognition will follow.
I graduated from CSUF in 1991, and a UCLA football supporter. I think we would be lucky to have an academic and athletic program like UCLA. Football aside, they have the most NCAA titles and are in the top 15 in academics every year. You should be careful who you choose of compare.