The Sporadic, Short Life of CofC’s Football Team

College football is almost a religion in this country, yet despite having 19 varsity sports, including a terrific men’s basketball program that returned to the NCAA Tournament this year, the College has one glaring omission – football. We had a team once. Is there a possibility we could have one again?

A Basketball School

The last time the College played football in the early 1900s, its ragtag squad was lucky just to cobble together enough men and equipment to take the field, let alone find an opponent. After years of fits and starts through the 1900s and 1910s, the team was finally disbanded in 1923. The Maroon and White faded into history.

Over the ensuing decades basketball would become the face of CofC athletics. The College’s reputation as a basketball school was solidified during the era of former men’s basketball coach John Kresse, the Hall of Fame coach who oversaw the team’s jump to Division I in 1991 and led the Cougars to a string of NCAA Tournament appearances in 1994, 1997, 1998 and 1999.

A North Carolina native, Matt Roberts was all too familiar with the College’s past basketball successes when he was deciding whether to accept the job as athletics director in Charleston in 2016.

As he evaluated his options, there was one thing that gave him pause. Roberts, a self-described football junkie, reflected on the fact that CofC doesn’t have a football team. He knew he would be making a long-term commitment to Charleston, so he had to at least consider the football question.

“There was the thought that if I go to a school that doesn’t have football, is that a positive or negative from a career standpoint?” recalls Roberts.

After all, Roberts’ résumé includes stints at Southern Methodist University in Dallas and the University of Oklahoma, both schools with deep roots in collegiate football. He wondered if becoming the athletics director at a university where men’s basketball has long been the marquee sport would be the best move for him.

So, he talked it over with people he trusts, mentors who have been ADs at nonfootball schools, and they all told him the same thing: “You’re going to love it.”

In the final analysis, Roberts decided that the positives at CofC – athletics programs that can compete at the conference and national levels, great academics and quality of life – vastly outweighed the absence of football. He signed a contract and became the College’s athletics director in January 2017.

Now in his second year as AD, Roberts says he’s found that working in an athletics environment that’s not dominated by football has allowed him to better appreciate all of the College’s 19 varsity sports and 358 student-athletes.

“Not having football as a focal point and having the array of sports we do have has really been different and great in many ways,” he says. “It’s allowed me to spend more time with other coaches and other student-athletes that maybe I wouldn’t have otherwise because football is so time-consuming. It does dominate the attention and resources.”

While a handful of universities may contend at the highest levels in both football and basketball, most tend to identify as either a football school or a basketball school. In fact, there are almost 100 Division I schools without a football program, including Boston University, Marquette and Virginia Commonwealth University.

Otto German ’73 knows exactly which camp CofC falls in. He’s been around the College for nearly 50 years, first as a student-athlete on the basketball team from 1970 to 1973 and later in a variety of senior administrative roles across campus. He’s currently the associate athletics director for compliance.

“Certain schools have an identity as being a football power or a basketball power,” says German. “If you trace the history of the College in its early years, it had a football team, but it didn’t survive. I’ve never really seen the College of Charleston as a football institution. The College of Charleston right now is known for its basketball. Basketball is the face of the athletics department. End of discussion.”

A Galvanizing Force

Football in the South is practically a religion, and it’s inevitable that folks will ask why a major public university in South Carolina (a state which boasts national powerhouse teams in the Clemson Tigers and Carolina Gamecocks) doesn’t suit up for the gridiron.

Vince Benigni, a professor of communication who has served as the College’s faculty athletics representative since 2009 and worked as a sports information director before entering academia, says there’s almost no equal to football when it comes to mobilizing a university community.

“What makes college football so popular isn’t just the on-field product, but the weekend-long festivities that accompany the game, especially in the South,” says Benigni. “College football is the most significant source of student and alumni engagement, representing the passion and pride of a university through a traditional weekly outlet.”

As commissioner of the Colonial Athletic Association, of which the College is a member, Joe D’Antonio has seen firsthand the many positives that a football program can bring to a university.

“Right, wrong or indifferent, America loves football. They love any kind of football. That’s why I think done correctly, marketed correctly, and with the right level of support from a member institution, it can be a really neat thing for a school to have,” says D’Antonio. “It gives you potentially a galvanizing opportunity for the campus as a whole during the fall period. It gives the campus an opportunity for an event, a series of events, during the fall for the campus to come together and rally around. It creates a feel-good atmosphere within the campus structure.”

Among the arguments often made in favor of starting football at CofC are that it would increase national visibility, boost male enrollment, grow alumni engagement and seed fundraising.

But Roberts counters that those benefits aren’t necessarily tied to a successful football program; a school with a healthy athletics program that’s full of high-achieving student-athletes, whether or not it includes football, can lift up the university as a whole.

“Being competitive in athletics is enhancing the brand of the institution,” Roberts says, noting the recent success of the men’s basketball team, which returned to the NCAA Tournament this year after a 19-year absence.

Benigni agrees that the College and its athletics program are already on an upward trajectory – without football.

“Making the NCAA Tournament in basketball this year was critical for our institutional identity, and our national profile,” says Benigni. “We have the infrastructure through a beautiful arena, a tremendous coaching staff and administration, and an invigorated fan base, to make a powerful statement.”

And while they may never root for a CofC football team, that doesn’t mean that athletics administrators at the College are anti-football.

Laura Lageman, senior associate athletics director at the College, grew up in Buffalo, N.Y., and lived through that city’s collective sadness of watching their beloved Bills make it to four consecutive Super Bowls in the 1990s only to lose each time. She also attended graduate school at the University of Florida, cheering for the Gators in the legendary stadium known as “The Swamp.”

Having spent most of her career at a nonfootball school, Lageman has come to appreciate the fact that the absence of football provides an opportunity for other sports to shine. That’s the case with volleyball, which she coached at the College from 1989 to 1995.

“In the fall, I used to coach volleyball, and to me it was a plus not to have football because we could get some of the donors, students and fans to come to our event versus football,” she says. “It gives other sports opportunities to kind of get their own niche with the boosters.”

Roberts says another unanticipated benefit of the College not playing football is that it’s left him with more time to enjoy the sport as a spectator.

“Selfishly, I’ve loved just being a fan. I love the sport of football. I’m a football junkie, especially college football,” he says. “It’s really been fun this past fall to sit at home on a Saturday with my family and watch College Game Day and cheer for whoever I want to cheer for and not live or die with every snap and every penalty and touchdown.”

Money Monster

The old adage that says you have to spend money to make money might not apply to collegiate football, where massive sums of upfront investments in scholarships, facilities, coaching and staffing are no guarantee that the program will ever earn a dime.

NCAA Division I football is split into two subdivisions: the Football Bowl Subdivision (FBS) and the Football Championship Subdivision (FCS). The College is a member of the Colonial Athletic Association, which has football teams competing in the FCS.

Most of the big money being made in college football is at the FBS level, home to the Power 5 conferences (ACC, Big 12, Big 10, Pac-12 and SEC), where teams get a cut of revenue from lucrative television broadcast deals, are allowed more scholarships and have minimum attendance requirements for games.

But starting a team in the FBS comes at a steep price. A 2016 study commissioned by Wichita State to evaluate the feasibility of starting a football program at the FBS level estimated the start-up cost would be $75 million. Starting a football program in the FCS may cost much less, but the potential financial rewards are also significantly less or nonexistent.

“There is very little money, if any, that’s being made in FCS football,” says D’Antonio. “None of our schools in the CAA – I would suggest to you, none of the schools in FCS football – are in it for that reason. This is not about the money. Most of our institutions, if not all of them when it’s all said and done, will lose money as it relates to football.”

Any school that gets into football for the money is in it for the wrong reason, he adds. “I can’t stress enough: it’s not about the money. It’s about the opportunity being provided to the men who play, and it’s about the opportunity for that sport to play an integral role in the development of a positive culture for that member institution’s campus as a whole.”

Estimates vary, but it’s safe to say that the College’s athletics department would take on at least a few million dollars in new operating expenses if it attempted to start a football program. Many schools have offset these new expenditures by increasing student fees. Even still, this new investment only covers the basics, such as scholarships, coaching and staff salaries, equipment and travel. When you add in the cost of building a stadium and practice facilities, the total price tag to start football at CofC could reach into the tens of millions of dollars.

Of course, there’s always the possibility, however remote, that a wealthy donor will show up on the CofC campus one day and offer to fund the establishment of a football team.

Roberts is at least willing to entertain this hypothetical, if for no other reason than it allows him to reaffirm his priorities for CofC athletics. First, before allocating a single penny to start football, he’d make sure that the College’s existing programs are up to snuff with adequate resources.

“I’d certainly want to make sure that if we ever had that opportunity that it would only enhance the other sports and wouldn’t detract from them,” he says.

Next, he’d start figuring out how to allocate football scholarships. At the FCS level, universities are allowed to award up to 65 scholarships a year. But for every student-athlete you add to an athletics program, including walk-ons, you must ensure there is a commensurate amount of coaching, academic support and training personnel.

“To staff, coach, train and manage that number of student-athletes, you’re talking about adding another 30 full-time positions at a minimum,” says Roberts. “Then, you have travel and equipment. And we haven’t even talked about a facility yet.”

Like all universities that receive federal funding, the College devotes considerable time and resources to complying with the federal law known as Title IX. Established in 1972, the groundbreaking legislation prohibits sex discrimination and mandates gender equality in athletics.

In college athletics, you can’t talk about the male-dominated sport of football without also considering its disproportionate impact on female sports.

Title IX governs a host of areas that includes student interests and abilities, athletics benefits and opportunities, and financial assistance. Athletics scholarships must be provided to men and women in proportion to their participation rates in a school’s athletics programs.

At the College, where the student body is about 64 percent female, adding football would be particularly problematic from a compliance standpoint because you’d be skewing the gender makeup by taking on upwards of 70 or 80 male student-athletes.

D’Antonio says the Title IX implications alone would make adding football at a school like the College a major uphill battle. To offset the large influx of male student-athletes needed to support a football program, the College would have to consider adding another women’s sport or consider cutting a men’s sport to make room for the football players.

That’s why the football discussion is so complex, says Roberts.

“With Title IX you are probably expanding by more than one sport – so you have that additional investment in support, equipment, staff and facilities for that sport. You can’t just make that decision about football in a vacuum – it impacts a multitude of issues. It’s not as easy as it appears on the surface.”

A Place to Call Home

OK, so you have a blank check from a generous donor, a motivated university administration and community, and you’ve worked
out the Title IX issues associated with adding football. Now you need a football stadium, and the College, landlocked
on the Charleston peninsula, isn’t exactly flush with real estate options.

To Roberts, the notion of building an on-campus football stadium is a nonstarter. Realistically, he says, a stadium, assuming you had the eight or nine figures in hand to build it, would have to be erected off campus. That means busing players, students and equipment to the games.

“The best situations are certainly those where you have an on-campus facility,” says Roberts. “That just wouldn’t be an option here in Charleston, so you’d have to look elsewhere to find the land to build something like that.”

It’s been suggested that the College could negotiate an arrangement to play home football games at The Citadel’s Johnson Hagood Stadium. But that’s still about a two-mile bus ride or a 45-minute walk from the College.

And whether you build new or share, the stadium is usually just for games. Football teams generally don’t practice on their game fields unless they are covered with artificial turf. Now you’re searching for more real estate or at least negotiating with another school or entity to secure adequate practice space. If the practice field is not proximate to campus, you’re once again busing the whole operation back and forth from campus.

While the College has managed to find success with off-campus facilities for its tennis, baseball and softball programs at Patriots Point in Mt. Pleasant, the needs and resources for those sports are not as significant as they would be for football.

The idea of the College building a football stadium could also prove unpopular given that other CofC sports have long gone without dedicated facilities. For example, the College has a women’s track and field team but no track.

“At this point, we’re still looking for a site to build a track,” says Lageman.

Undefeated Since 1923

Despite a lack of players, financial resources, institutional support and teams to compete against, the college of Charleston’s short-lived football program, which existed in various forms from 1899 to 1923, can be admired for its tenacity and perseverance.

In the years when a team could be mustered at all, the men rarely won, and, in fact, usually lost in lopsided blowouts. But for a few years, at least, a small number of student-athletes eagerly signed on for a chance to represent the Maroons on the gridiron.

Some years, as many as 30 men – an impressive number when you consider the College’s total enrollment in those years hovered around 100 to 150 students – volunteered to be pummeled by bigger, better-coached and better-equipped teams.

A review of records in the College’s Special Collections and other sources indicate that the College first launched a football program in 1899.

Some of the best documentary evidence that the College assembled football teams in the 1900s and 1910s comes not from official records, which are scant, but from letters that players were required to sign pledging that they would make up any missed class work and abstain from drinking liquor while traveling for games.

The high-water mark for CofC football appears to have come on Oct. 22, 1910, when the College defeated its crosstown rival, The Citadel, which had bested the smaller CofC team in prior meetings. Following a trick play in which the College’s quarterback hid the football under his jersey and ran 60 yards before the unsuspecting cadets could tackle him, the College won the game 11-0. Jubilant CofC fans poured out of College Park Stadium and paraded through the streets of downtown Charleston.

But the celebration would not last. Football at CofC was on borrowed time. At least one factor that contributed to football’s decline at the College was the perception by some that football – and sports more generally – were barbaric and distracted students from the primary purpose of a college education: learning.

The same year that his school beat The Citadel, CofC President Harrison Randolph received a letter from a director at the Charleston YMCA admonishing the College for allowing its students to play football.

“We do not regard inviting the general public to patronize athletic games at which profane rooting is permitted as in keeping with the high purpose of college education,” the YMCA director wrote.

This mindset persisted well into the 1940s as evidenced by a 1946 letter from CofC President George Grice to the chair of the College’s Board of Trustees. In declining an offer by an unnamed donor to underwrite the revival of CofC football, Grice laid out what he viewed as the evils of football: “… football as it is conducted by the average American college is the most serious handicap to honest educational work in institutions. It is dishonest and corrupting in its program of subsidizing young men. It is a boon to the gambling and liquor interests … To add football to our present problems, in the judgement [sic] of myself and my colleagues, would be disastrous for the College.”

The last time the College played football in the early 1900s, its rag-tag squad was lucky just to cobble together enough men and equipment to field a team.

A few years after the College’s big win at The Citadel, the outbreak of World War I sidelined the program from 1914 through at least 1920, when attempts were made to restart it under new coach and alumnus Fritz Von Kolnitz, who also attended USC, where he was a football and baseball star before going on to play three seasons of major league baseball for the Cincinnati Reds and Chicago White Sox.

Although the 1920 squad didn’t compete in any intercollegiate games, the rebuilding year allowed the CofC team to practice and to raise funds for uniforms and other expenses, at least a portion of which was derived from student fees.

By 1921, the revived football program was ready to compete. The College’s opponents that year were in-state schools Erskine and Newberry colleges and, in a rare road game, CofC traveled to play against Rollins College near Orlando, Fla. The Maroons were routed in all three games by a combined total score of 106-0.

But the losses didn’t dampen the enthusiasm of writers for the College yearbook, The Comet, which optimistically opined that “ … one should not regard the scores” and instead recognize that the College “… has for the first time in some years taken up football, which is a game that cannot be played with marked success unless the team is a seasoned one.”

Citing “financial difficulties” and the fact that collegiate athletics rules banned freshmen from playing on the varsity team, the College was forced to decline invitations to play other games in 1922.

The College managed to field only a “freshman” team that year, although it included a few upperclassmen. The 11-member lineup faced just one opponent from the local YMCA and lost by a score of 13-0.

Explaining the team’s lack of success to an athletics official at another college, a member of the College’s Faculty Committee on Athletics wrote, “Our team is very light, and naturally inexperienced.”

But defeat would ultimately define football at the College. In 1923, the team played just one game – a scrimmage between upperclassmen and freshmen.

Seeing the writing on the wall, a writer for the 1924 Comet yearbook made one last plea for football: “Many have expressed their opinion that the College should relegate football to the past, and put all their energy into basket-ball and baseball. They would have her slip into the realm of footballess schools whose campuses never ring with the stirring cheers of the assembled multitudes, whose alumni never retain a memory of hard-fought victories. Yet this will be the inevitable result if we do not take a greater interest in football, placing it on a firmer foundation.

The writer’s fears were well-placed. The College would never again field a football team.

If You Build It

So, against all odds, you manage to fund, staff, recruit and field a football team. The team’s success now hinges on winning and building a fan base, which are not mutually exclusive.

German questions whether the Charleston area, which is already home to football programs at The Citadel and Charleston Southern University, could support three NCAA football teams.

“Let’s be realistic. Look at Charleston Southern. When Charleston Southern added football, look how long it took for
them to become successful as a football institution.”

And then there’s the fervent loyalty of Clemson and Carolina fans and the huge support base that both teams enjoy across
the Lowcountry. Would local Clemson and Carolina fans support CofC football?

Those are real concerns, says Lageman, noting that the College already goes out of its way to avoid scheduling competitions for other sports when Clemson or Carolina are playing.

“Their fans are so fanatical about their football we try not to schedule during those games so that they will come and support our programs,” she says. “You don’t want to go against Carolina or Clemson football if you can help it.”

If the College were to ever seriously consider starting football, the logical starting point would be within its own conference, the CAA, which has a separate 12-member football conference.

D’Antonio says the CAA is always open to considering proposals from its member institutions.

“My first step would be that I would have to gather the football membership and find out if we would be willing to expand to add a 13th member because there are all kinds of scheduling innuendos that would need to be worked out relative to that,” he says. “But certainly, it’s not something that we would immediately dismiss, and it’s something that we would give a lot of credence to and be willing to take a very close look at.”

But such a proposal isn’t likely to come from Roberts. “I have no interest in adding football as another sport for all of the reasons I have mentioned. I believe it would take away from the student-athlete experience of our current students, and I don’t believe the university would be positioned to enhance the resources for the College and the athletics department.”

For now, and for the foreseeable future, German feels confident that the basketball program he helped build and grow is not at risk of being pushed aside by football.

“I know a lot of people love football, but guess what? The College of Charleston has never been known to be a football institution,” he says. “Now I may be dead and gone when they do have one, and I’ll look down favorably upon it. But I just don’t see it becoming a reality – at least not in my lifetime.”