TheDistrictWeekly.com

August 29, 2007

2! 4! 6! 8! WHY THERE’S NO FOOTBALL AT LONG BEACH STATE!

A sports story in five easy lessons
By Steve Lowery

When Boise State running back Ian Johnson took the ball on a Statue of Liberty play, swept left, and ran into the end zone for the two-point conversion that beat Oklahoma in the Fiesta Bowl, it not only capped the best, most exciting college football game of last season, it got some people to thinking: Hmmmm, if Boise State—in Boise . . . Boise, Idaho—can build a program to challenge the big boys of college football, why can’t (fill in the blank)?

“Boise State is going to cost a lot of people their jobs,” said F. King Alexander, president of Long Beach State, where the football dance card has been blank for the last 15 years. “Everybody thinks they can be Boise State. They can’t.”

Perhaps least of all Long Beach State, which dropped its football program after the 1991 season, when the team went 2-9 and was outscored by 205 points. Yet when people see Boise State—which Long Beach State played, and beat, in 1990—on a national stage, it’s understandable they might wonder, Well, what if?

Is there anything more college than college football? Does anything bring a campus, a community, together better than a winning football program with all its traditions, pageantry, and alcohol poisoning? It’s not surprising that Alexander is asked about restarting the football program “all the time.” (Soon after Athletic Director Vic Cegles was hired in 2006, he participated in an online chat in which the fourth question asked him—by Brandon of Garden Grove—was “Do you think Long Beach State will ever get their football team back?”)

Alexander hears it from students, alumni, boosters, community leaders, and (hardest of all, he says) old football players.

“Those are the ones that break your heart,” he said.

That’s because Long Beach State is not bringing back the football program. It’s hard to say never, but things nationally and in Long Beach would have to change significantly for it to ever happen.

That wasn’t easy to write—partly because I’m an alumnus and remember going to games at Veterans Stadium in the ’80s, but mostly because this article was supposed to be a blueprint for how the school could bring back football. Like everyone who considers restarting the program, I was swayed by Long Beach State’s greatest strength: its proximity to football talent.

No university may be better situated geographically to recruit top football talent than Long Beach State. Long Beach is a hotbed in itself, and the greater Long Beach/Los Angeles/Orange County area is one of the great repositories of high-school football talent in the nation.

“The only other areas that can even be mentioned are South Florida and Texas, around Houston and Dallas,” said Brandon Huffman of Scout.com.

The Greater Long Beach Area features such powerhouse programs as Long Beach Poly, Los Alamitos, Mater Dei, and Mission Viejo. Whenever a university in the west suddenly spikes in football success, you can pretty much bet that it has tapped into the Southern California market. Last year Boise State had more than 30 players from California, most from Southern California—from high schools such as Los Alamitos, Dominguez, and San Dimas, where they found Ian Johnson.

So: talent, check.

The problem is everything else. There’s the football spending that Alexander likens to the Cold War. There are the guns of Murray State and gender equity and a few dozen others things that have made Division 1-A football—now called Bowl Subdivision—one of the NCAA’s slowest-growing sports.

Then there are those hurdles that are soooo Long Beach—things like apathy and poor timing. Death. Yes, this being Long Beach, there is a star-crossed quality to all of this—the fact that the football program may have been doomed by one of its greatest victories.

As much as I hate to say it, there are some very good reasons why Long Beach State doesn’t, and won’t, have a football team this or any other year. Here are five:

LESSON ONE: FOOTBALL IS EXPENSIVE

The Long Beach State athletic budget is $11 million. That might sound like a lot. It’s not. Not if a school is going to have football, which Cegles—backed up by other university athletic officials—estimates would cost a minimum of $6 million a year to sustain. So Cegles is talking money when he says that “there is no discussion even to put together a plan to look at a proposal to bring back a football team. The reason is there are no funds to do it.”

Long Beach State competed in what is now called Bowl Subdivision football, where the big boys play, and where the biggest of those boys tend to suck up all the money. Of the 119 schools competing at this level, only a handful—estimates are from 15 to 20—actually make money off of football. The sport is so expensive, with its 85 scholarships, ever-growing coaching staffs, training tables, equipment, liability insurance, travel expenses, etc., that it is prohibitive for just about any school. But the problem is those 15 or so uber-schools just keep upping the ante.

When the University of Florida, defending national champion, recently held a fund-raiser for its program, it lasted all of three hours and raised $9 million. (It was reported this week that the school is selling dinner with Gator coach Urban Meyer for a cool $1 million, not including tip.) And while Florida . . . and USC . . . and Texas up the ante, other schools have no choice but to try to play along in a game that Alexander likens to “spiraling Cold War spending.”

When Alexander was an administrator at the University of Illinois, he said he was shown a new 80-yard indoor practice facility. When he asked how many games Illinois actually played inside, he was told: one.

“University of Minnesota,” he said. “That was it. They had built the facility to keep up with Ohio State and Michigan, to impress recruits. Things are so stacked, the amount of money being spent, I could tell you that not even the University of Illinois, a Big Ten school, could keep up.”

So it’s not just a matter of having money for the 85 scholarships and the nice facilities and all, but you also need the money.

First, talent chases the money. It wants to play—and practice—in the nicest facilities. It wants the best coaches, knows that the programs with the most money have the best chance for success, the best chance for national exposure (TV). Then, the whole thing flips, and the money chases the talent—which is why someone will pay a million dollars to find out how Urban Meyer takes his steak.

The kind of money it takes to keep a top-level program can’t be raised through student fees and ticket sales. Not even close. You have to have generous boosters and local sponsorship—which Long Beach is well known for not giving the school.

In the late ’80s, with the program in crisis and rumors rampant that it might be dropped, Press-Telegram Sports Editor Jim McCormack attempted to drum up local support. His goal was to raise $300,000. To do it, he reported fund-raising efforts every day at the top of the sports section, running the names of donors, encouraging people to get involved. McCormack thought it was important to have a football team, that it “was important to the university and the community. Without it, there’s a void I still feel today.”

His aggressiveness didn’t sit well with a lot of people at the paper, who viewed it as unseemly boosterism. Tensions became so heated that the department’s Christmas party was cancelled.

Eventually, they did raise the $300,000, but it took a long time, a lot of donors . . . and $300,000 today won’t get you potato skins with Urban Meyer. Looking back, McCormack says he’s proud of what he did, calling it “a grand exercise by a bunch of average Joes. There were no [Nike founder] Phil Knights showing up.” Problem is, you need Phil Knights. (Knight gives his money to the University of Oregon.) It’s nice to have average Joes, but you need guys who can write checks for indoor practice facilities.

“Anytime I hear from local people, business people, that they want to see football back [at Long Beach State], I tell them all they have to do is just call me and tell me you can get me four to five million,” Alexander said. “You know what? That phone doesn’t ring.”

LESSON TWO: BAD TIMING, THE TERRELL DAVIS STORY

Long Beach State lost its last football game, 37-36, to Cal State Fullerton. Sportswriter Billy Witz, who covered the game for the Press-Telegram, said it was one of the best games he’s ever seen. Fullerton kicker Phil Nevin, who went on to play Major League baseball, kicked the game-winning field goal.

On the sidelines that day was a little-used running back named Terrell Davis—the Terrell Davis who would eventually go on to become a two-time Super Bowl champion, a Super Bowl Most Valuable Player, a National Football League MVP, and, some day, perhaps, a Hall-of-Famer. That day, however, he was just some guy that people thought the team should use more.

“I know it’s easy to say now, but I swear to you, a lot of us were saying, ‘They should use that Davis kid more,’” Witz said. “He’d started one game that season and gained 100 yards. In another game he’d taken a screen pass and gone 70 yards with it. You could just see he had something.”

People did see. When Long Beach State folded its football program after that season, UCLA and Georgia came after Davis hard. Davis eventually chose Georgia.

So what does this have to do with Long Beach State keeping its football program? As hard as it is to maintain a football program, it’s even more difficult to create a football program. Facilities have to be procured or refurbished. Entire coaching and support staffs have to be hired, entire football teams must be recruited and signed and the entire balance of athletic scholarships must be [IS THIS A TK?] (more on that later).

It’s a task so daunting that Cegles says that if Long Beach State decided today to have a program, it would take several years to get a team on the field.

“If they had managed just to keep the thing going—you know, attract a few thousand people to the games—it’d be much easier to come in now and upgrade the program, because everything is already in place,” Cegles said. “But to begin all over again these days is really difficult—next to impossible.”

But let’s say the program had been saved in 1991. Let’s say that the team came back in 1992 and Davis became who Davis became and people got interested and excited about this kid and the team he was leading. Perhaps it could have sparked enough interest to maintain the program.

Never happen? Well, it did . . . in San Diego, where a running back by the name of Marshall Faulk virtually saved San Diego State’s program by himself, in turn making the Aztecs nationally relevant for the first time in years.

It was all the more critical that the Long Beach program be saved in 1991, because the next year the NCAA changed its scholarship rules, limiting schools to a maximum of 85 total scholarships and a maximum of 25 new scholarships each year. That meant schools like USC were less likely to warehouse players, allowing the dispersal of more good players to more schools.

“There were 300 players from California who signed with Division 1 schools last year,” said Huffman of Scout.com. “Even if you allowed that the big four (Pac-10 members USC, UCLA, Cal, Stanford) gave all 25 of their scholarships to players from the state, which they never do, that still leaves a huge pot of talent for the rest of the schools. You don’t think Long Beach would have a chance attracting some of that talent? If they had just managed to maintain things, I think the rule change would have helped them tremendously.”

LESSON THREE: BOYS & GIRLS

Long Beach State maintains one of the best overall athletic programs in the nation. It begins this school year with teams ranked among the top 25 in women’s volleyball and soccer, as well as men’s water polo. Running any college athletic program these days is a sensitive balancing act given the requirements of gender equity that demand an equal number of scholarships for both males and females.

Right now, with the sports Long Beach State has, it works. Baseball and softball balance each other, as does men’s and women’s volleyball, soccer, water polo, and track. But there is no female counterbalance for football and its massive 85 scholarships. The only way to produce equity is to either add more women’s sports, thereby ballooning the budget even more, or to drop some other men’s scholarship sport. Most schools do the latter.

Said one athletic official at a California university (who asked not to be identified):

“General students may love having a football team, but I can tell you it can be hell on your athletic department. Most of the other men’s sports don’t like football. Basketball and baseball are safe, but the rest of them, they’re looking over their shoulders wondering [about] not only how much money football is going to soak up, but if it’s going to mean dropping wrestling or something else. And it’s not the women worrying: it’s the men. Everyone understands who’s going to get cut.”

LESSON FOUR: COPS AND PLAYERS

Alexander and Cegles, the two men who have the most say about bringing back football to Long Beach State—and the two men who seem most dubious about doing that—absolutely luuuve football.

Alexander is from Florida—“where it’s required by state law to be a football fan”—and used to sell soft drinks at Gator games. His brother played quarterback at Duke for Steve Spurrier. Cegles’s son played college football. Cegles’s most memorable experience in college athletics was serving as an assistant athletic director at Arizona State the night it beat Nebraska.

“The whole campus was just electric that night,” he said. “I get a tingling up my spine just speaking about it. I’ve been to Final Fours with schools, but nothing compares to that. That’s what football can do.”

But there are other things that football can do that are familiar to anyone who reads the daily sports police blotter. Alexander became well acquainted with this when got his first gig as a college president in 2001 at Murray State in Kentucky.

Not only did the program struggle at the gate—King says they averaged a paltry 3,500 a game—but also off the field.

“I should have known something was wrong when the first kick of the season, this kid takes it back for a touchdown,” Alexander said. “I asked someone, ‘Hey, where did we get him?’ And they tell me he transferred from Mississippi State. Great, I thought. And then I found out he’d left Mississippi State because he’d been caught passing around counterfeit $100 bills.”

Talk to Alexander for any amount of time about football, and his experience at Murray State will come up. Not only were they bad experiences, but you get the distinct impression they are experiences that color his view of starting a team today.

“If you start a [football] team, you have two choices,” he said. “You either get a whole bunch of new players, build a team with freshmen, and get beat down; or you bring in hoodlums. I had the hoodlums at Murray State, and they were beating up the basketball team, and there were semi-automatic weapons and drugs in the dorms. I’m still doing depositions to clean that up.”

LESSON FIVE: BAD TIMING, THE GEORGE ALLEN STORY

A good deal of the Long Beach State bookstore is set aside for clothing—mostly T-shirts, sweats, and caps, most of them black and gold, the school’s colors.

There is a T-shirt dedicated to Long Beach State football, and it has this message printed across the front: “Long Beach State Football/Undefeated Since 1991.”

While 1991 is the last season Long Beach State had a football team, the seeds of the program’s destruction go back a year, when things couldn’t have seemed better. In 1990 the school hired the legendary George Allen to coach the team. It was a stunning bit of news. Allen, an eventual NFL Hall-of-Famer, was coaching a team that had gone 4-8 in 1989 and had not had a winning season since 1986.

I was a sportswriter at the time working for a nationally-distributed sports newspaper.

Like a lot of others, I was dispatched to Long Beach to ask the question everyone had of Allen: Why?

He gave answers about challenges and something he called the “brotherhood of pain,” that nothing brought men together like shared suffering. Most significant to Long Beach State was that the question was being asked by people all over the country. With this one hire, the school had raised its national profile to heights it had never known. Even when it began the season losing 59-0 to Clemson and went on to begin the season 0-3, Allen and his team were still news.

Then, out of nowhere, things started to click for the team. They would hang close in games and win in the last few minutes. Victorious in five of their next seven games, they went into the season finale against Nevada-Las Vegas with a record of 5-5 and the possibility of posting a winning record—thought to be an impossibility just a few weeks before.

When Long Beach State beat Nevada-Las Vegas, 29-20, it was national news. Allen stayed on the field well after the game was over doing interviews with all manner of media outlets. He did them despite weather in the 50s, did them despite the fact that his players had dumped a cooler full of cold water on him at the end of the game. Drenched and no doubt cold, he did the interviews, anyway.

That was Nov. 17. On Dec. 31, George Allen died. The cause of death was ventricular fibrillation, though some believe Allen had been weakened by the cold he caught from the water-dumping.

A year later, Long Beach State football was dead, too.

Would it have all been different if Allen had lived? Would his very presence have saved the program long enough to take advantage of Terrell Davis’s talent and the change in NCAA rules?

“I think so,” McCormack said. “I think George Allen’s season at Long Beach State is one of the most amazing things I’ve ever seen in sports. I think of the national attention, the energy he brought. I remember that they had a campaign to upgrade his office with air conditioning, and they got the money quite quickly.”

Allen got what he wanted, whether it was air conditioning or changing the school colors from brown and gold to black and gold.

“You think anyone at Long Beach State was going to say ‘no’ to George Allen?”

After Allen’s death, the team was given over to yet another NFL Hall-of-Famer, Willie Brown. But all the magic and interest of 1990 was gone. Witz remembers that the close games the team had won under Allen they now lost under Brown. The final loss at Santa Ana Stadium came and went with little notice or dread.

“There were rumors that the program might be dropped,” Witz said. “But after the game, everyone just walked off the field. That was it.”