What UAB's football death means to UNC Charlotte

The University of North Carolina at Charlotte and University of Alabama-Birmingham have often been seen as sister schools, at least athletically. The former Conference USA mates have metro campuses in their state's largest city, and each has fought the commuter school image. Both have also experienced athletic success - mostly in basketball - but they defer in popularity and influence to their state's flagship universities.

Tuesday was a hard day at UAB. College president Ray Watts announced that the school's football program would be shuttered at the end of this season. It was a sad, emotional day, as grieving and angry football players confronted Watts and collapsed in the arms of a school chaplain.

Why did it happen? Students and alumni point to the University of Alabama Board of Trustees, which has long been less than supportive of UAB football. Many are convinced that one of those trustees, Paul Bryant, Jr., was getting payback for a 1991 letter that then-UAB athletic director Gene Bartow wrote to the NCAA about investigating the Alabama basketball program.

All of which could very well be true. But there also were financial causes for the football program's death. Like many universities and colleges - including some of the largest - the UAB football program needed the school's help to make the bottom line work. In an era of tighter academic funding, the school was forced to weigh football against other places the money could go, Watts said.

At UNC Charlotte, football is a new, very different thing right now. It's a valuable recruiting tool, an important part of student and alumni life. The football Niners are on an upward trajectory, with the Football Bowl Subdivision in the near-term plans and big victories in the long-term dreams.

UAB had some of those big victories once, but the death of the program is a reminder of the other possibilities out there for schools that don't reside in big-time athletic conferences. We could be seeing more UABs in the coming years, more college administrators looking at a tough budget landscape and calculating what value their football program brings.

That calculation is about to get less friendly for football. In August, the NCAA Board of Directors passed a measure that would allow the five biggest conferences - including the ACC and SEC - to change rules in recruiting, expenses, financial aid and other areas. The changes will likely allow these Power 5 schools to pay some student-athletes a stipend on top of their scholarships.

Non-Power 5 conferences can adopt the same changes, and many probably will at the start, because saying no would also mean saying goodbye to all the TV revenue that the big conferences bring for everyone. But going along with the changes will place an even greater burden on smaller schools with smaller athletic budgets.

It's inevitable that more schools will bow out of the football arms race. Some will compete on a lesser level, which is considerably less sexy than having a big-time college football program. That will bring about a whole new round of is-it-worth-it calculations.

Used to be that the answer was "Yes, of course it's worth it" - at least if you wanted to be seen as offering students the complete college experience. That's a lot of what drove UNC Charlotte's entry into football. But that entry also came with the prospect of big stadiums filled with big crowds for big Saturday games. As that reality becomes less accessible for many schools, leaders will have more justification to weigh the expense and hassle of football against its payoff. That's hard to imagine at UNC Charlotte, where football is all about possibilities right now. But that also was true - not so long ago - at UAB. 

Peter St. Onge