I Wish the Tulane Administration and Board Understood the Value of A Good College Football Program

Last Saturday, Tulane lost to arch-rival LSU by a score of 34-9. Despite the lopsided final score, the game was very exciting until a couple of ill-timed turnovers in the 3rd quarter put LSU in control for good.

However, Tulane took a 9-7 with a touchdown late in the second quarter over a team that was a 41-point favorite according to Vegas oddsmakers and a funny thing happened: The Tulane alumni base woke up.

I got phone calls and text messages from all over the country. No one could believe what was going on. As an enormous football fan, I’m somewhat embarrassed to say that I myself was sitting at home at 9am Saturday morning having had no intention of making an event out of watching Tulane inevitably get thrashed again. But that changed.

I put on my old Tulane lacrosse jersey, slapped on a Tulane visor and rushed out to the local sports bars. The first bar I went to was overloaded with the Maize and Gold of Michigan fans. Of the 10 or so TVs at the bar, 8 were tuned to the Michigan vs Northwestern game and the 100 or so fans erupted for every Michigan first down and broke out into the Michigan fight song after every touchdown. I walked down the street to another sports bar only to find a similar scene for Virginia Tech alums. And then another bar where Arizona State fans gather.

Tulane fans don’t have a home base bar and for the most part probably couldn’t tell you the name of the upcoming opponent.

You see, the Tulane football program has been victimized by decades and decades of University leadership that simply does not understand what athletics means to a University. As a result, Tulane alums have been beaten down by perennial mediocrity or worse and rarely pay attention.

From voluntarily leaving the SEC (where membership alone guarantees ~$10M+ annually from BCS and television contracts), to tearing down Tulane Stadium to build a parking lot (an on campus stadium famous enough to have hosted the first Sugar Bowl and 3 Super Bowls), to hiring the inept Chris Scelfo over the sublime Rich Rodriguez, to the infamous Athletics Review of 2003 (in which the Tulane Administration believed that Division 1-A athletics were too expensive to justify participation) it seems as though Tulane cannot stop shooting itself in the foot.

While Tulane University President Scott Cowen seems to have gotten (somewhat) on board since his 2003 brain fart, Tulane still does not “get it”. The program is run on a shoe-string budget compared to most Division 1-A football programs but more appallingly, Tulane has more stringent admissions requirements than other Division 1-A universities.

Tulane is an expensive private school in one of the poorest and least educated states in the country. Yet the school maintains an elitist admissions policy that en route to alienating the majority of Louisiana residents also has the profound affect of disqualifying most of the talented football players in Louisiana. Or any other state for that matter. And Tulane also does not allow JUCO transfers.

I believe the only Division 1-A football programs with similar admissions standards are Notre Dame, Stanford and perhaps Duke (All 3 are top 20 if not top 5 universities and all have lucrative conference and/or television revenues) and I believe all 3 of the programs do allow JUCO transfers.

So many football players who qualify for admission at places like Wake Forest, UCLA, North Carolina, Georgia Tech, Boston College, Virginia, Northwestern, as well as football powerhouses such as Florida, Texas, Penn State, Wisconsin, Cal-Berkeley, Michigan and USC would not be accepted at Tulane.

How faulty is the logic behind this policy?

First of all, each one of the aforementioned universities is ranked ahead of Tulane in the latest US News and World Report College rankings. What’s worse, I don’t think anyone but the most ardent followers of Tulane athletics (a small, small cadre of us) even know that this policy exists. I challenge the Tulane Administration to find out how many in the Tulane family know that such a policy exists or why. I suspect they’d be shocked to find out that 1) no one knows and 2) no one cares. Since no one outside of the Tulane family knows that Tulane has decided to tie one hand behind its back, they can only see a one-armed football program.

Personally, I want the best football players at Tulane. Just as I would expect a brilliant artist who might be a little short on his verbal SAT scores to be admitted to the art department, I expect exceptional football players who qualify by NCAA requirements to be added to Tulane’s football program. And frankly I don’t care if a brilliant chemist cannot run a sub 5.0 second 40-yard dash.

Despite being underfunded and slapped with pointless recruiting restrictions, Tulane’s administration wonders why the program loses money and alums don’t buy tickets or donate money. It treats the athletics department as a seperate P&L and expects the department to fend for itself financially with the still looming threat of financial viability or extinction.

What the ivory tower eggheads that run Tulane have never understood is that the football program is, by a wide wide wide margin, the most visible part of a University and that perception is amplified many many many times for a university in the south. While the academic-types would prefer that this were not true, it is the undeniable reality.

Scott Cowen has said that he understands as much, but his actions indicate that he doesn’t. If he did, he’d realize that Tulane should be investing heavily in the program, as well as giving athletic director Rick Dickson and head coach Bob Toledo the easily obtainable resources to put Tulane on equal footing with the Cal-Berkeley’s of the world.

Nothing would generate more interest in Tulane locally or nationally than fielding a first class football program. Instead, each week during extensive college football coverage on television and around the internet, Tulane is seen as a bottom feeder, and also-ran or worse. And at the end of the day there are many more people around the country aware of the quality of Tulane’s football program than the quality of the art department or the chemistry department or the law school.

And while I do understand that the post-Katrina Tulane is cash-strapped, this is not a huge financial commitment in the grand scheme of the University’s operating budget. We’re talking about increasing the Tulane athletics annual budget from around 1% of the universities annual budget to around 2% of the annual budget. The difference that would make, in intangible good will, alumni giving AND direct revenue in ticket sales would be substantial and more than make up for the additional expense. That would be the single greatest thing Cowen could do for every facet of the rebirth of Tulane University and its relationship to post-Katrina New Orleans.