Point/Counter-Point: Football at UIS - NO

February 03, 2010
By Marcus Johnson
Sports Reporter

Picture this. On a Saturday afternoon you’re waking up at around 9 in the morning to get ready to go tailgate before you watch the Prairie Stars take on Quincy University in a GLVC football battle.  You’re really pumped for this battle because they are two heavyweights in D-II football.  Now let’s look at reality. This dream won’t happen anytime soon, and hopefully will never happen. UIS announced a few weeks ago that they will pass on adding a football team to current lineup of athletics.  UIS might have made one of the best decisions when deciding upon this.

While adding a football team to the athletic program would really help generate money for the school, there is no guarantee that this will actually happen.  In actuality, the school would be losing money.  The startup cost for such a sports is an enormous amount of money. 

In 2008, Barton Community College in Kansas thought about starting a football program at their school.  In a news released they issued October 22, 2008, they estimated that startup cost which included building a stadium, hiring coaches and bringing in around 100 players and buying equipment would cost about $13 million.  I would believe that it would probably cost our school around the same amount seeing that Barton is about the same size as UIS.

With the current problems with the Illinois budget, there is no way we can start a football program at UIS.  With the state currently owing the University of Illinois school system $400 million dollars, our school has no type of money to spare to start new sports programs. We already are having a hard problem finding ways to pay our staff and faculty, so employing new staff would make it even harder.

While there are a lot of people that are fans of football on this campus and in the community, I still believe that we would also have a hard time packing a 5,000 seat football stadium.  The students and the community currently don’t support UIS athletics right now. If you go to a soccer game or a basketball game here on campus, the place isn’t as packed as you would think it would be.  Athletics don’t have much exposure in the community, and I think that’s one thing that the school must really focus on before even thinking about adding more sports programs.

Of course people are probably thinking that having a football team will really help our school get more of a national spotlight and would help bring money into the school. But are we willing to take the risk of starting a program up at UIS? There are so many things that could go wrong with starting up a football team. Of course there could be many rewards of everything goes right, but right now the risks outweigh the rewards. UIS prides itself on being a small liberal arts college, and I believe that if they want to continue this tradition they have to stay away from football.