Last Saturday I watched New Hampshire wide receiver David Ball break Jerry Rice’s NCAA touchdown record on ESPN. All day. It wasn’t the first time Ball made SportsCenter this season. On Sept. 9, his team made the highlight reel after upsetting Big Ten team Northwestern on the road.

To the rest of the country, the win was noteworthy because Ball’s team competes at the 1-AA level. To the Binghamton community, the win was noteworthy because UNH is a school in the America East conference.

If New Hampshire can make headlines with its football team, why can’t Binghamton do the same thing? On Tuesday we examined the history of Binghamton’s football problem. Now we’ll take a look at the problems Binghamton University would face today if it tried to start a team.

Gender Equity

One of the biggest obstacles Binghamton would face is Title IX, which states, “No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving federal financial assistance.” Those 37 words may be the reason why BU’s athletic director, Joel Thirer, will never create a football team.

“Right now we’re more or less in compliance with Title IX,” Thirer said. “If we threw football into the mix, we’d have to add 100 opportunities for women.”

Title IX wouldn’t just require another women’s team to offset football — it would require matching scholarship numbers and participation rates. A football team has over 90 players on the roster, about 55 of whom have scholarships at the 1-AA level. Those scholarships would cost over $1 million, a figure that would need to be matched on the women’s side. If BU wanted to field football, it would have to cut men’s swimming, wrestling and baseball, just to name a few sports.

“It’s off the table, out of the question. We’re not cutting these sports,” Thirer said.

Usually that’s where the discussion ends for Thirer. But let’s suppose Binghamton did in fact choose to include football. What would the costs be?

Dollars and sense

Let’s pretend that you are Binghamton’s new athletic director. You have decided, after much complaint from the student body, to create a football team. But where? You can’t play football in the Nature Preserve — it was granted to the school under the condition that no construction could ever take place, and besides, it’s a marsh. The only existing field that has sufficient space along the sidelines and a reasonable landscape for expansion is inside the East Gym track. Forget, for the moment, that this field runs east to west, a no-no in football.

“To make the track football-worthy — seating, lights, players’ quarters, I’m going to say you need $10 million invested, and that’s a conservative estimate,” Thirer said. “And that’s with only keeping about 3,000 bench seats there. If you wanted to reconfigure it north-south, you’re probably talking $20 to 25 million.”

And this potential stadium hardly seems exciting. It seems to be lacking, well, a scoreboard. Adding a scoreboard that can do more than just display the score and time would cost almost $1 million more.

The football team needs coaching, doesn’t it? Add $.5 million for five full time coaches, plus another 45 percent in benefits. A hundred football players need a few more trainers and strength and conditioning coaches, too. Add $35,000 to $40,000 apiece, plus benefits.

And where are all these players going to go at halftime? Where are they going to dress before the game? In the new field house, of course. For that, add $10 million to $15 million. After all, the visiting team needs lockers, too. What are the players going to put in those lockers? Roughly $1,000 worth of equipment each, that’s what.

Take out the calculator. That’s almost $40 million, plus another $3 million or so per year.

This is OK, you’re telling yourself. You’ll just hit up DeFleur for money, right?

Wrong.

As the new athletic director, your budget is $8 million a year. Half of that comes from part of the mandatory activity fee that students pay in tuition. You can’t get more money from there — you’ve seen how vicious those students get when you increase their tuition. Another $2.5 million of the budget comes from state funding. The school won’t budge on this one, not one bit. There are salaries to pay and blacktops to renovate. The last $1.5 million comes from revenue, which is raised through marketing, ticket sales, the NCAA (from basketball) and, oh yeah, alumni donations. But alumni donations only account for $.5 million a year, and good luck finding more. These are, after all, the same people that used to fight those tuition increases.

“Unless someone, somewhere, was willing to make a huge investment in Binghamton University athletics comparable to no other investment ever made in the history of the University, it’s just not in the cards,” Thirer said.

But wait, you say — you’ll make all the money back from football!

Gee, you’re naive.

On Tuesday, we’ll wrap up the series with a look at the potential revenue and benefits of a football team. Here’s a hint: it isn’t much.