When I was in high school my brother, Jeff, attended the University of Delaware. When his Blue Hens made it to the 1-AA football national championship against Colgate, he took a road trip to Chattanooga, Tenn., to witness his team spank the Red Raiders by a tune of 40 to 0. Jeff, holding a sign reading, “All I want for Hanukah is a National Championship,” was seen on ESPN and the front page of the Delaware News Journal the next day.

I thought college sports would be that exciting for me.

Little did I know that a flagship state school with 14,000 students could actually lack a football team. Binghamton’s basketball is great. And soccer and lacrosse are fun enough, but what is college without football? That’s what most people seem to think, at least.

In conversations with BU sports historian Tim Schum and Athletic Director Joel Thirer, I set out to find out exactly why Binghamton does not have a football team.

“It would have been easier to have had a football team now had we had one from the beginning,” Thirer said. Obviously, Thirer is correct, but that begs the question: Why didn’t Binghamton add football early on?

In the first of a three-part series, we’ll take a look at the historical reasons for the glaring hole in our fall sports lineup.

Glen G. Bartle

His name graces the most visible landmarks on campus, and he nurtured the school into what it has become today. But Bartle, one of the school’s early deans, is also largely responsible for the decision not to form a football program here at BU.

Remember that Binghamton used to be Triple Cities College, a division of Syracuse University, a school that already had its own stellar football team. In the early years of TCC, there was a push for football from the student body and even from faculty, but Bartle was fundamentally opposed to football and argued against the petition. He felt football would diminish the academic focus of the college.

That may not have been his only reason.

“I think another factor he never wanted to get involved with was having the football coach make more money than he did and garner more publicity than himself,” said Harpur College historian Steve McIntire, in an interview with Schum. “Again, he based that on what took place at the time in big-time football.”

In October of 1948, students again petitioned to create a football team, this time with support from the student government and the Colonial News, the precursor to Pipe Dream. The Colonial News ran an editorial listing its reasons:

1. We have student support.

2. We will have access to excellent facilities.

3. The Triple Cities is rich in football talent, a lot of it right here in school.

4. We need community support and there is no better way to get it.

5. We need to have no feeling of inferiority in competition.

“This year more names will be added to the list. Be sure yours is on it!”

The petition was sent to the chancellor of Syracuse University. Unfortunately for football supporters, TCC was set to leave Syracuse and join the SUNY system — a fact that compelled Syracuse to ultimately reject the bid.

One last attempt to create football in the formative years came in 1950, once TCC became Harpur College and joined the SUNY system.

Bartle, who had become the provost of Harpur, now had the power to reject football himself. In a meeting with faculty, he said “football would not improve the college but would be a definite liability if we were unable to control it once it had begun.”

There was no serious discussion about football for another 40 years, but as time passed, another factor worked against any serious drive to bring football.

“When the track was built in the early ’60s, the guy who was in my position back then did absolutely not want to have football here under any circumstances,” Thirer said. “He built the track east-west as a conscious effort to preclude football from being played on it.”

A recent effort

Schum recalled a more recent push from the student body.

“In the early 1990s there was a referendum passed for a student activity fee in support of the recreation program,” Schum said. “Alongside that referendum, I had another check-off; students would be able to support an intercollegiate club football team. There were some teams in the late ’80s and ’90s, primarily at some smaller institutions, that ran club football teams.”

Somehow, the activity fee passed while the football initiative did not. Granted, a club football team would not have been all that exciting, but at least it would have been a start. When BU moved to Division I, it initially filled the lacrosse roster with players from the club team already in existence. If a club football team had been in place, who knows what could have happened — football can’t cost that much more than lacrosse, right? Not quite.

On Friday, we will look at the associated costs of creating and running a football team, and why they are not feasible for BU.