It’s a beautiful Boston Saturday afternoon in September. The leaves are starting to change color, the Red Sox are back in the pennant race and you have nothing to do because schoolwork hasn’t buried you yet, so you turn on the TV.
All of a sudden, BAM! There’s 50,000 college football fans screaming their faces off, trying to give their team that extra push to win awesome stuff like ‘the Keg of Nails’ at games with even more awesome names like ‘The World’s Largest Outdoor Cocktail Party.’ It’s hard not to feel just a little jealous of them right?
All things considered, we’re incredibly lucky to be sports fans at BU. We all bore witness to maybe the greatest NCAA hockey game ever played. We can almost smell the hot dogs, fresh grass and stale vomit of Fenway Park from our dorms, and, maybe most importantly, we don’t have to live in places like Lubbock, Texas or Tuscaloosa, Ala. But nothing could beat grilling some burgers, painting your chest and going a little insane on a fall afternoon, right?
Everyone has blamed BU’s administrative suits and their tight pockets for the demise of the football program. Football fans have every reason to revile former University president John Silber, the man Sports Illustrated reporter Gerry Callahan called an ‘arrogant little despot,’ for unceremoniously yanking the program in 1997.
Silber always seemed to hold an unfair grudge against football. He somehow had the ridiculous idea that a solid football program precluded a school from academic greatness.
‘University of Paris, University of Oxford, University of Cambridge have gotten along remarkably well and never had football,’ he told The Daily Free Press after yanking the program.
One of the reasons Silber wanted to pull the program was his obsession with improving BU’s academic reputation, and saw football as another obstacle in his way. He couldn’t understand that there is middle ground between places like Free Shoes University and Oxford, and that most BU students don’t want our school to become either.
The way Silber handled shutting down the program was unforgivable. He yanked the rug out from under the players and coaches with hardly any warning. The Board of Trustees announced the decision in October, after the Terriers were already a month into their season.
Many players said they felt so betrayed it was hard for them to play football again. Linebacker Dan Hart told The Boston Globe it felt like the players had gotten ‘slapped in the face.’ It was an absolutely unforgiveable thing to do to the team that worked hard for its fans every week. But Silber is not the only one responsible for the tragedy.
Silber said he cut the program because it was bleeding money. That’s true ‘- it lost almost $3 million per year. The president knew that not only was the program too broke to survive, it also didn’t have the fan support to oppose him and make the decision a public relations nightmare.
‘Football is simply not a program that captures the interest of students,’ Silber told PBS.
Terrier football games typically drew about 2,000 people to Nickerson Field, which can hold more than 14,000 spectators. Hockey games at Agganis Arena draw more than double that number and regularly sell out the 6,300-seat Agganis Arena.’ Even though a few members of the BU community were upset, there was simply never enough momentum to spark a serious debate about the issue.
Following the announcement, a New York Times reporter came to BU hoping to photograph students protesting the decision.
‘I told him there weren’t any demonstrations,’ former BU sports information director Ed Carpenter told The Boston Globe. ‘He walked all the way to Kenmore Square anyway and still couldn’t get a picture . . . and that was the problem.’
The BU student body has changed since 1997. Silber is long gone. The success of the men’s hockey team and the arrival of a new men’s basketball coach have people who thought ice only existed in rap lyrics sporting their red-and-white hockey sweaters down Commonwealth Avenue. It would be a great time to bring the football program back, if the window of opportunity hadn’t long passed.
As much as I hate to make the tired ‘in this economy’ argument, bringing back any program that would lose money makes no sense for the University financially. I know tuition increases every year, and I still would be willing to add a little to my student loans to watch BU football on Saturdays.
But BU made some pretty drastic and unpopular moves to save money. They froze the massive Student Village project, placed a hiring freeze and even reduced our print quota. The return of a program that lost $3 million a year would mean not just a jump in tuition, but more corners cut and more unhappiness for all of us who are scraping the bottom of the barrel to cover tuition costs.
No decision about sports should be made purely on a financial level. Sports mean so much more to people than dollars and cents can explain. But the BU football problem goes deeper than money. As fans, it would be difficult to win back our players’ trust.
What if you were a star high school quarterback looking to play college ball in the northeast? You come to BU and learn that the newly reinstated program is starting over with a completely new roster of players. You’d be playing in an outdated and mostly empty stadium. Worse, the school has students and officials who have been not only apathetic but who outright abandoned their team. That sounds like the beginning of a Major League sequel, not a way to attract talent to the school.
It’s going to take a long time to convince anyone, administrators, coaches or players, that BU is ready for a football team. That’s completely unfair to the diehard Terrier fans that show up not only to Agganis, but also yell from the creaky rafters in Case. It was just as unfair to the former players who felt stabbed in the back and the fans who braved the rainy fall afternoons at Nickerson 12 years ago.
But for now, let’s consider ourselves lucky and support the programs we’ve got. Maybe then the University will realize that there are a lot of football fans among the red-and-white clad screaming mobs at Agganis.
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