http://www.tricities.com/tristate/tri/op...-0004.html
the board is always asking what we can do. Go post a comment.
---------------------------------
ETSU fumbles opportunity to benefit from football program
Sunday, Dec 23, 2007 - 12:00 AM
BY J. Todd Foster
Send e-mail
Bristol Herald Courier
A man wearing a face mask and approaching my mouth with a drill always gets my attention.
Fortunately, I’ve only had two cavities in the past 35 years. But when I got one filled Dec. 13, I saw first hand the angst created by East Tennessee State University’s 2003 decision to drop football.
This newspaper outlined the aftermath of this decision in a nine-story, three-day package last week in one of the most stunning pieces of journalism I’ve had the pleasure of editing.
I have no stake in this controversy; then again, I’m not Dr. Jeff McMillin, DDS.
Dr. McMillin had no idea when filling my cavity that this newspaper was preparing a package by Brian T. Smith, whose reporting begs the question of whether ETSU is headed for irrelevancy. The good dentist simply was telling me about his son, Bart, the starting long snapper for the Orange Bowl-bound Virginia Tech Hokies.
But Bart, his father lamented, could have been a starting linebacker graduating this spring from ETSU, which signed him and 11 other regional kids to full-ride scholarships in February 2003, just weeks before ending the football program.
Bart McMillin didn’t get the news from ETSU but from whispering classmates at Tennessee High School.
“[Dr. Paul] Stanton knew he was going to cut the football program,” Dr. McMillin said. “The coaches had no inclination. My son was recruited by two fine men. Coach [Paul] Hamilton talked about it being the best recruiting class in a long time. But Stanton knew that was a joke. He was probably back there laughing about it.”
Bart McMillin landed on his feet because his father could afford to pay his tuition for his freshman and sophomore years at Tech, allowing him to walk on to the football team. Meanwhile, Bart is headed toward a master’s degree in construction management.
“But what about the seven or eight black kids from this area? That might have been their only ticket,” Dr. McMillin said. “It was classless the way ETSU handled this. They didn’t care about the lives it affected.”
Dr. McMillin is a football fan, but he’s also a businessman who understands the economics of cutting a football team that was losing $1.1 million a year. But the Bristol Tennessee dentist also knows that ETSU for many years did a poor job of promoting its football program and then killed it without telling even its coaches.
It was the way it was done more than what was done that upsets him to this day.
When I arrived in this area about a year ago, I was struck by how far ETSU had fallen in stature. It has the lowest profile of any state-supported four-year school I’ve ever lived near.
It wasn’t that way when I graduated – gasp – 25 years ago from Middle Tennessee State University in Murfreesboro. I knew of ETSU.
ETSU and MTSU have similar histories: Both schools opened in 1911 and became teachers’ colleges. In 1930, the Johnson City school had 1,420 students – nearly three times more than MTSU.
In 1961, ETSU’s enrollment topped 5,000, according to the school Web site, versus its Murfreesboro counterpart’s 3,243.
The year Lyndon Johnson was elected president, ETSU topped 7,000 students and then flattened, not hitting 12,000 until 1990.
MTSU’s profile soared, and the school hit an enrollment of 16,000 in the early 1990s, 20,000 in 2001 and today has 23,246, or nearly the enrollment of the University of Tennessee.
Once a Division I-AA football school like ETSU, the Blue Raiders of MTSU left the Ohio Valley Conference for the Sun Belt Conference to play in the NCAA’s top division. Today, MTSU plays some of the biggest powers in the country and last year went to a bowl game.
ETSU, which defeated a Terry Bradshaw-led Louisiana Tech in 1969’s Grantland Rice Bowl, began de-emphasizing its football program in the 1990s and dropped it in 2003. It now plays basketball in the Atlantic Sun Conference, whose obscurity is a regular punchline on ESPN.
It isn’t MTSU’s football program that draws students nationwide and from foreign countries. The school has renowned recording industry, aerospace, nursing, business and journalism programs. But ETSU has medicine and pharmacy schools and is highly regarded in its own academic right.
And yet the respective schools’ football programs seem to illustrate the different directions they’re headed: Middle Tennessee does not make a dime off its athletics program, according to its latest filings with the federal government. It broke even with revenues and expenses at $17.3 million a year, while ETSU spent $5.1 million last year and turned a $300,000 profit.
While that looks better on paper, there’s no question that the ETSU brand is fading regionally, losing ground to former arch-rival Appalachian State.
Appy State spent $9.6 million on athletics and also broke even in 2006-07. But its football team beat Michigan this fall and just won its third national title in the second-highest classification under college football.
Johnson City has 60,000 residents and Boone, N.C., home of Appy State, has 13,000. But where would students rather be on a fall Saturday afternoon? Which school would they want on their résumés?
J. Todd Foster is managing editor of the Bristol Herald Courier and may be reached at jfoster@bristolnews.com or (276) 645-2513.
