Winthrop University should take a good hard look at football

Click here for a guest op/ed piece, written by yours truly, published a few days ago in The (Rock Hill, S.C.) Herald. In case the link does not work, I'm copying and pasting my column here:

By Larry C. Timbs Jr.
Special to The Herald

I know Winthrop University, where I retired after teaching journalism for 27 years in May 2013, likely has committees (full of smart people) and task forces or whatever studying the feasibility of football.

And the last thing anyone in the university power structure needs is another opinion on the matter.

But please indulge me briefly.

For the great majority of my tenure at Winthrop I thought having a football team there was an insane, silly idea--for the usual, familiar reasons: hard enough to support Winthrop's current teams/sports; local football enthusiasts would go to Clemson and USC games, not to Winthrop football contests; lack of money at Winthrop to fund football; extraordinary cost of building a football stadium. And the list goes on.

It so happens now that I am living in Johnson City, Tenn.--home of East Tennessee State University (a publicly funded university, as is Winthrop) of about 14,000 students. I walk almost every day on the ETSU campus. I hang around with ETSU faculty, staff and students, and with my two dogs, at the nearby dog park (one of my favorite spots in Johnson City.)

ETSU last fielded a football team in 2003, I believe. Some main reasons for terminating Buccaneer football: the university had increasingly scarce resources and felt it could no longer fund this sport; attendance at games—played in what some said was an inadequate inside facility (the ETSU minidome) had been declining for some time, with many folks around here seeming to get their pigskin high from the University of Tennessee in Knoxville (about 100 miles away); memories of ETSU’s glory football teams in the late 1960s and 1970s, which had received national recognition in that era, seemed to have faded.

Over the last few years, the university, local community and many alumni and students have had a spirited (and sometimes cantankerous) debate on the pros and cons of bringing football back to ETSU.

Long story short: ETSU will field a football team in the Southern Conference in fall 2015. So football is being resurrected here.

(Word at the dog park is that when the last president of ETSU—just a few years ago—was a candidate for the top job, he was told/ordered by an alum with deep pockets to make the idea of a football team come true. That may or may not have actually happened. I share this with all you readers in Rock Hill somewhat reluctantly, because we have a rule here: what is said and done at the dog park stays in the dog park.)

A head coach has been hired. Phil Fulmer, fired a few years ago as UT's football coach, but still widely respected in the Volunteer state, has served ETSU as a consultant. A new multi-million dollar, outdoor stadium will be built--although the ETSU football team will play its first season at Science Hill High School's stadium. Much of the community and campus seems excited, revved, psyched. Press coverage here about ETSU football has been way positive (my opinion). Even people at the dog park are wagging their collective tails and tongues (in a good way) for ETSU football.

So there's excitement in the air here. A sense of positive anticipation and hope pervades this place. A recent scrimmage of the Blue and Gold teams at ETSU got a lot of upbeat attention throughout NE Tennessee.

All this might be something for Winthrop to take into account.
What can Winthrop do to capture the public's imagination? To stir people up in a good way? What can and should it do in light of its stagnant enrollment--very little growth, if any, that I can discern over the last 15 years or so?

What would a football team, playing its games outside in a nearby sun-drenched stadium on a Saturday afternoon, with a marching band all decked out in Winthrop’s colors, do for the community? For the university? For those who absolutely love the game of football? (Think pep rallies, parades and tailgating).

An administrator at Winthrop once told me: Winthrop can do whatever Winthrop REALLY WANTS TO DO.

Footnote: Those naysayers of football for Winthrop who point out we could never compete with the likes of a USC or Clemson ought to remember what happened a few years ago when Appalachian State University took down mighty Michigan in the Big House in Ann Arbor.

I’m told that news of that incredible victory was announced over the public address system at the Walmart in Boone, and shoppers, even those who were not football enthusiasts, went crazy. When the team, fresh from the victory, landed at Tri-Cities Airport just outside of Johnson City, a caravan of honking cars followed the ASU players’ and coaches’ buses all the way to Boone. (And all those smug but embarrassed folks in Michigan finally learned how to pronounce Appalachian).

Food for thought for Winthrop University and Rock Hill.

Larry C. Timbs Jr. retired as an associate professor of mass communication at Winthrop University in 2012. He is a lifelong University of Tennessee football fan and closely follows the Carolina Panthers.