UAB president Ray Watts announced Tuesday that the school was cutting its football program. Tight end Tristan Henderson did not take the news well … at all.
The University of Alabama-Birmingham killed its football program on Tuesday.
President Ray Watts, claiming the school subsidized $20 million of the athletic department’s $30 million annual budget, said the program would require an extra $49 million over the next five years if it kept football.
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Included in that was $22 million in facilities upgrades.
"“The fiscal realities we face—both from an operating and a capital investment standpoint—are starker than ever and demand that we take decisive action for the greater good of the athletic department and UAB,” Watts said in a statement (per ESPN.com).“As we look at the evolving landscape of NCAA football, we see expenses only continuing to increase. When considering a model that best protects the financial future and prominence of the athletic department, football is simply not sustainable.”"
Tight end Tristan Henderson, who is the second player who speaks in the video below, gave a gut-wrenching response to Watts about valuing money over the lives of the student-athletes in that room.
Henderson is a former military policeman in the Army who served in Iraq and will be 27 next week. But his concern was for the teenaged athletes in the room who were suddenly cast adrift.
UAB is the first school to drop Division I-A football—now known as FBS—since Pacific in 1995.
Watts also got an earful—or several—from a crowd assembled outside the football facility after the meeting with the players.
The cruelest ironies of all are the fact that coach Bill Clark just completed his first season with the program and guided the Blazers to a 6-6 record, just the second time in the program’s short history it was bowl-eligible.
Henderson, as part of his rant at Watts, accused the university president of lying to Clark during the hiring process.
"“This man walks to you, walked in your office and said, ‘You’ve got to do it the right way for me to be here,’” Henderson said. “And you said you would. And now you just pull the plug? So you lied to the man’s face?”"
Clark left the head coaching job at FCS Jacksonville State to take the UAB job in January.
AL.com reported Wednesday that Watts may not have been entirely truthful, either, when he said:
"“Killing football was not what we set out to do.”"
However, the CarrSports Report on UAB Athletics, dated Nov. 18, would indicate that may have been the goal from the start of the review process.
"“In accordance with the university’s new strategic plan, UAB Athletics’ Strategic Planning includes a rigorous evaluation of its appropriate NCAA Division I classification and sports sponsorship—including the possible elimination of football, UAB’s most resource intensive sport.”"
That statement was not the conclusion of the report.
It was in the introduction.
That would indicate that cutting football wasn’t a conclusion of the report. It was a major consideration entering into the process.
UAB launched its program at the Division III level in 1991 and was compelled to move up to Division I-AA two years later when the NCAA passed a bylaw that prohibited athletic programs from competing across divisions.
The Blazers moved up to Division I-A in 1996.
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