ZHANG: CU football program due for reconsideration

Columbia’s 35-28 win over Brown capped off an otherwise forgettable football season. This is hardly surprising, however, given that the consistently underwhelming team has failed to win anything of note in any non-GS undergrad’s living memory. On the back end of yet another miserable season, it’s time to ask ourselves: If we don’t have a football team capable of competing with the nation’s best, then why do we have one at all?

We hang onto the football team despite its failure to justify its existence year after year. Successful college football programs serve at least one of two often inseparable functions. They are either NFL stepping stones or indispensable to the identity and existence of their institutions as a whole. Columbia’s football program is neither.

We pretend that Ivy League football matters when the harsh reality is that it doesn’t. Today, not a single Ivy League team could hope to compete with true college football powerhouses and few, if any, Ancient Eight players hope to be taken in the NFL draft.

Only 11 Ivy League football players have been taken in the NFL draft since 2000, none of whom are, by any stretch of the imagination, elite. Arguably the most prominent of the bunch, Buffalo Bills starting quarterback and Harvard graduate Ryan Fitzpatrick, has had an NFL career that can be described as mediocre at best. At the beginning of the NFL season, New York Giants quarterback Eli Manning was laughed at when he ranked himself among the league’s elite quarterbacks, but at least he was in that conversation. Six seasons after he debuted in the NFL, Fitzpatrick isn’t even close to being talked about as an elite quarterback.

Columbia’s last NFL-bound player, defensive end Marcellus Wiley, had a successful professional career that included a Pro Bowl selection in 2001. Even in his day, Wiley was much more of an anomaly than he was the norm—at Columbia and in the Ivy League. In 2011, players do not come to Ivies hoping for a career in professional football. Compounded on that is the reality that neither Ivy League nor Columbia football have improved since then. The Ancient Eight is still waiting for a player to replicate the success of Wiley, and the Lions—who went 8-2 in Wiley’s senior season—have failed to reproduce that result since.

At this stage in our football history, it is no longer fine to accept the existence of the program simply as something that exists without adequate reason. Historical precedent and sentimentality are no longer good enough—nor is football’s presence at peer institutions. For decades, these arguments have not been good enough for ice hockey, lacrosse, or squash—and those Ivy League programs are actually relevant in the bigger NCAA and professional pictures. Why do we privilege football?

Some argue that the Ivy League was created as a football league and cutting football might jeopardize our inclusion in it. Let’s be real. Today’s Ivy League is a collection of elite universities, not athletic programs. Columbia’s exclusion from the athletic conference would be little more than a technicality. The Ivy League has outgrown its purely athletic structure and will continue to thrive without it.

The existence of some universities depends on the success of their football programs. OSU uses money from its multi-million dollar football program to fund its academic operations. LSU’s identity is really one of a football team much more than it is a place of learning. Those universities have real, existential reasons that justify spending millions of dollars on coaches and setting aside dozens of enrollment spaces on recruits. Columbia’s football program doesn’t even justify its current existence.

To remain as a stagnant part of a less than mediocre conference is neither honorable nor desirable. To do it for reasons of sentimentality, continuity, or conformity undermines Columbia’s willingness to accept change and to question established beliefs. It conflicts with the more important values of thinking and learning that define us as a university. The time has come for Columbia to evaluate what it wants from its football program.

Columbia and football are not at all incompatible. Stanford’s program is an obvious example of elite football and academics coexisting. Aaron Rodgers’ career after Berkeley is an unambiguous case of NFL success out of a college where academics precede football. Football success is not impossible, but we have to be willing to pay for it—and it is not cheap. If we want football success we have to leave Ivy League competition and its restrictions on scholarships and recruitment. We also need to be willing to pay the millions of dollars a year necessary to hire an elite football coach and dedicate enough enrollment space in Columbia’s undergraduate colleges to fill the need for recruited players. To have a worthwhile football program—capable of competing with the nation’s very best and producing future professionals—we need to be willing to accept sweeping changes to Columbia’s current infrastructure. Without those changes, we should question whether we need a football team at all.

Lanbo Zhang is a Columbia College sophomore. He is an associate editorial page editor for Spectator.
sports@columbiaspectator.com