Each fall as students head back to class and make the best of the limited summer sunlight left, one resounding question seems to resurface as colleges across the country start a new academic year.
No, it’s not why there aren’t any dorms or why is the student housing facilities off-campus. The oh-so-common fall question is: Why doesn’t Metro have a football team?
College football is the one sport that has been able to fully integrate itself with the fall academic semester and has become, in some ways, more popular than professional football. But why doesn’t a college with a reputation for excelling in athletics have a football team?
According to Athletic Director Joan McDermott, the answer to that ever elusive question comes in three parts.
The most obvious reason stems directly from our current national financial situation. The cost of a football team far exceeds the most successful varsity sports at Metro, making the probability of starting a football program weak at best.
“With football, you have a minimum of three full time coaches,” McDermott said. “You have your head coach; have your offensive coordinator, your defense coordinator and then, a lot of times under them you’ll have an assistant defensive coach and an assistant offensive coach, who are also full time.”
The cost of a minimal football coaching staff with three coaches would approximately amount to between $150,000 and $175,000. To reduce the program cost of football, schools with graduate degree programs will have graduate assistants on their coaching staffs, McDermott said.
And that isn’t all the financial worries of a football team.
The cost of equipment combined with traveling and awarding athletic scholarships can keep the cost increasing rapidly.
As a Rocky Mountain Athletic Conference rule, the amount of scholarship money that a RMAC school can award cannot exceed 28 full-ride scholarships, which is eight less than the maximum amount the NCAA will let division II schools award.
“With 28 full scholarships, you could break those down, give a whole bunch of guys tuition, fees, and books, then you can spread that money pretty good,” McDermott said. “It’s still going to add up quite a bit, [$400,000] to $500,000, just thinking off the top of my head.”
The second reason Metro is footballless comes from gender equality requirements that NCAA schools must abide by.
According to NCAA.org, Title IX is a federal statute created to prohibit sex discrimination in education programs that receive federal financial assistance. In other words, since the Metro athletic department receives federal funding it must provide equal opportunities in athletics for both male and female athletes.
“Say you have a roster of a hundred guys, I think that is pretty typical of a division II roster for football,” McDermott explained. “We would need to have that many more opportunities for women. We probably wouldn’t have to have 100 spots, but we would need to add a few more women’s sports.”
This doesn’t sound like a difficult task but since Metro already has every major women’s sport (volleyball, basketball, soccer, track and field, cross country and softball), the task becomes finding a sport with enough significant interest to build a program off of.
The third reason comes from lore of Metro’s beginning.
“I don’t know if this is true or not, but when the school was started and the charter was written, to start the school, that it was written in there that we can never have football,” McDermott said. “I’ve heard that forever.”
So, there it is. There isn’t one reason for the lack of football team, but a slew them. Whether it be a financial reason or just that Metro was never meant for football, pigskins and goalposts are not on the horizon for Metro’s sports.
