I had a ringside seat for the glory days of Portland State football, when the Vikings were pulling in five-figure crowds to the old Civic Stadium and contending annually for NCAA Division II national championships.
The late Pokey Allen’s teams played a rollicking brand of football and projected a sense of fun that invited fan participation. But Allen left after the 1992 season.
That was a long time ago. It’s a different world, and the PSU football program is struggling to maintain relevance as we head into the second decade of the 2000s.
In this op-ed for The O, Edward Hershey calls on Portland State to drop football. He calls the sport a “wasteful conceit.” His criticisms are fair and to the point. His conclusion needs more thought.
I’m old enough to remember when budgetary problems in 1981 forced the Vikings to reconfigure the athletic department. They dropped to the Division II level, cut the men’s basketball program and kept football.
Former PSU athletic director Roy Love said PSU held onto football because Civic Stadium provided Vikings a venue in which to play that was close to campus. The basketball team did not have a comparable venue. The PSU gym was too small and Memorial Coliseum too expensive.
For a while it looked like the smart move. But after Allen left and PSU moved back up to the I-AA level (FCS), staying competitive in football became more difficult. Crowds melted away, the Oregon and Oregon State teams improved and college football became wall-to-wall television viewing on Saturdays.
That is a lot of competition for eyeballs for PSU, a commuter school with a non-traditional student body.
When the Portland Timbers joined Major League Soccer and became primary tenants of what is now Providence Park, PSU increasingly felt unwelcome. The Vikings moved to Hillsboro Stadium, which is on the edge of the metro area. It’s a long way from campus, and further from the the city’s east side.
PSU now has a basketball venue, the new Viking Pavilion, and has had a men’s basketball program again since 1996. The reasoning Love provided for the decision to keep football and drop basketball has been stood on its head.
So, now what? Dropping football sounds like the quick and easy move. But what about the rest of the school’s athletic department? Football is a core sport in the Big Sky Conference. The Vikings almost certainly would be unable to remain a Big Sky member without it.
Even without football PSU doesn’t appear to be a good fit for the Division I West Coast Conference, made up of private schools, most of them Catholic, or the Division I Big West Conference, primarily California schools.
One reason PSU joined the Big Sky was because scheduling at the Division II level had become difficult and expensive due to the dearth of Division II programs on the West Coast. How happy would the Division II Great Northwest Athletic Conference, which includes Concordia and Western Oregon, be to include PSU and its approximately 21,000 students?
The best solution would be for PSU to stay in the Big Sky, play football games in a venue close to campus and the center of town, field a competitive team and hope that would lead to more fan appeal. But if you take Providence Park out of the equation, there isn’t such a venue.
The PSU football team went 9-3 in 2015. Winning isn’t impossible. The rest of it is daunting.
Dropping football sounds like the easy answer. But this is a conundrum that defies easy answers.
OK, more links:
Oregon needs to find a big target at receiver next season to replace Juwan Johnson.
Who are the most likely candidates to start at right guard for the Ducks in 2020?
AP names UO safety Brady Breeze to its all-bowl team. (Duck Territory)
North Dakota State, which opens the 2020 season at Oregon, knocks off James Madison to win the FCS national title. The Bison have won eight of the last nine FCS championships.
The Daily Star’s Greg Hansen contrasts Arizona coach Kevin Sumlin’s coaching staff and hiring decisions unfavorably with Oregon State coach Jonathan Smith. (Second item)
NCAA awards OSU defensive end Jeromy Reichner a sixth year of eligibility.
College Football Playoff expansion remains a hot topic among the sport’s decision-makers. (ESPN)
Dale Grummert of the Lewiston Morning Tribune: If Washington State wants to stick with the Air Raid offense, it severely restricts the head-coaching candidate pool.
Change is (probably) coming to the Washington State football program in the wake of Mike Leach’s departure, in style and substance. (Spokesman-Review)
Washington promotes offensive analyst Derham Cato to tight ends coach to complete Jimmy Lake’s staff. (Seattle Times)
Cato fits Lake’s philosophy, which borrows from previous UW coach Chris Petersen. (Husky Maven)
New staff members at Arizona signal a change in the defensive scheme. (Arizona Maven)
Running back Demetric Felton says he will return to UCLA for the 2020 season. (Los Angeles Times)
Highly-recruited JC defense end Justin Jackson is ready to write his next chapter at Colorado. (Boulder Daily Camera)
-- Ken Goe
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