Projo Sports Blog

"There has been zero discussion about dropping football," URI athletics director Thorr Bjorn told the Journal's Mike Szostak last week during an interview about the sorry state of the State University's gridiron program.

The next question ought to be: "Why not?"

The Rams finished the 2009 season 1-10, losing at home Saturday to Northeastern, which today announced it was dropping football because it was too expensive.

As recently as 2002, the Huskies, who finished 3-8 this season, won the A-10 title. But they drew barely 1,000 fans to their final home game Nov. 14, when they beat Hofstra, 14-13.

The Rams, in contrast, have had nine straight losings seasons, and have had only three winnings seasons since 1985.

Northeastern follows in the footsteps of Boston University, which dropped football in 1999, and Vermont -- like URI, a former member of the old Yankee Conference -- which dropped the sport in 1974.

Those three schools have something else in common -- they're all members of Hockey East.

Although the Terriers are struggling this season, they are a perennial national power. BU won the NCAA championship last year in a thrilling, come-from-behind victory over Miami of Ohio, after slipping past Vermont, 5-4, in the semifinals. It was the fifth national championship for BU.

Yet URI does not have a varsity hockey team, even though the state has turned out many more Division I hockey players than football players over the years.

Football is an expensive sport and these are difficult economic times. WIth the state in a budgetary crisis, URI has had to make cutbacks in all areas. It's a legitimate question whether the school can continue to afford to play football -- especially bad football.

It's not as if the lack of a football team would hurt the school's reputation. Of the six New England state universities who were in the Yankee Conference, only URI and Maine are considered "Tier 3" schools in the annual rankings published by U.S. News & World Report. In contrast, UConn ranks 66th among "national universities," followed by Vermont (88th), Massachusetts (106) and New Hampshire (110).

UMass and UNH also play in the prestigious Hockey East conference, along with Maine, which has won two NCAA titles.

The University of Chicago, which can boast of the first Heisman Trophy winner -- Jay Berwanger, in 1935 -- and legendary coach Amos Alonzo Stagg, played in the Big 10 until the school dropped football in 1939.

Yet Chicago continued to attract top scholars. It is ranked 8th nationally by U.S. News and World Report, tied with Columbia, just behind the likes of MIT, Stanford, and Penn, and just ahead of Duke and Dartmouth.

---