During the years of 1999 to 2003, the ETSU football team was losing close to $1 million dollars each year. Losing games and costing money, the ETSU men’s football team was sucking financially and on the field.

Budget limitations and state legislature that included Title IX were two of the many reasons that prompted ETSU President Stanton to terminate the failing athletic program.

Since it’s 2003 demise, the football team has benefited the university in its absence more than it ever hoped to while it was still alive.

The money that was being funneled into the dismal football team is now going toward university improvements both athletic and educational, as well as scholarships for students in other athletic programs.

Although Title IX’s main purpose was to promote equality among men and women’s teams within the athletic departments of universities, the 1972 educational amendment ended up meaning much more than that and become ETSU’s saving grace.

Without the termination of ETSU football, who knows how far the university would have gone to keep the program alive and limping along.

I believe that had the program remained open, it would have ended up costing ETSU students hundreds of extra dollars a year.

In a 2007 ballot referendum, students voted against an increase in student athletic fees that would pay for a new football program.

It would have cost almost $5 million to restore both the football team and institute a new female athletic department that would be required to meet the Title IX requirement.

Thankfully, the ETSU student population voted against the resurgence of the football program.

To bring back the football team, the athletic fees that students pay in their tuition were going to rise by the hundreds and that is most likely why most students voted against the return of the program.

For now, it looks like ETSU football is dead and buried. I am supportive of the university’s decisions in many things but one thing I will never support is the misuse of funding.

The only way that the football program could ever return to the ETSU campus is at the expense of all of the students who, after paying hundreds of dollars of athletic fees to bring football back, wouldn’t show up to the games anyway.

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