Can Fairfield be the next Appalachian State?
Imagine Fairfield in front of 110,000 hostile fans about to pull off one of the biggest upsets in college sports history. Unfortunately, the Stags will never have that opportunity since Fairfield doesn’t have a football team. But could it happen in another sport?
While a Division I school, Fairfield doesn’t have the resources of a large university making a large sport upset unlikely.
For comparison, Appalachian State earned 1.3 million dollars during the 2005-06 football season compared to a nearly 38 million for Michigan, according to cnbc.com.
In some respects, Fairfield is already making marks on the national scene. Last year, the men’s soccer team won the school’s first ever NCAA tournament game, beating UConn. The team continues to be nationally ranked this season as well.
However, women’s sports and smaller men’s sports are not the big money makers in college athletics. Despite the NCAA’s insistence on putting the emphasis on student in student-athlete, athletes playing football and basketball are making huge amounts of money for big-time programs.
As a small school, the discrepancies between basketball and every other sport are on a smaller scale, but they are still visible.
According to the U.S. Department of Education’s Equity in Athletics Data, Fairfield’s two basketball teams bring in slightly less than $2.9 million in revenue while the school’s remaining 18 teams bring in around $3.9 million.
It costs almost $19,000 for a single male basketball player, while every other non-basketball sport is between $1,000 and $3,000.
Of course, Fairfield claims it does not make any money since its revenues equal its expenses right down to the last dollar in the report.
Let’s face it though, even if a women’s team or a non-basketball men’s team knocked off a top team, nobody would be there to see it, which is a shame, but a reality right now for Fairfield athletics.
So Fairfield’s last hope for the same recognition as Appalachian State is the men’s basketball team knocking off a top-ranked team. If Head Coach Ed Cooley can recruit and coach his way up, it is possible, but it is tough, to contend with schools bringing in tens of millions of dollars.
Steroid Use Isn’t Always Black and White
Steroids are always a sticky situation for any sport. But there are preconceived notions that influence our perceptions of certain athletes, evidence be damned.
Barry Bonds, almost universally reviled by white America, has some evidence against him, but nothing as conclusive as Rick Ankiel, who was linked to receiving a 12-month supply of human growth hormone (HGH) in 2004 according to the Daily News.
Major League Baseball officially banned HGH in 2005, but Ankiel’s name has barely been smudged. He was supposed to remind us of a better time in sports and invoked Roy Hobbs, returning to baseball after a three-year absence while switching from pitcher to outfielder along the way.
Ankiel is white and Bonds is black, but race is not always a factor.
Race and Bonds have become hot topics with many black fans supporting Bonds as they see the media unjustly ripping Bonds every chance they get. If Bonds cheated, he deserves some type of punishment, but it is unrealistic to wipe his record from the books. There is no way of knowing how many other players took performance-enhancing drugs and benefited from them. And remember, the situation has been different for every era in baseball. Ruth didn’t play against blacks, at night, or travel across the coutry. But I’m more in favor of treating Ankiel like Bonds than Bonds like Ankiel.
Another factor is the sport the athletes play.
Shawne Merriman tested positive for steroids and was suspended for four games last season. Rodney Harrison received the same punishment of four games for admitting to receiving HGH. For some reason, fans just don’t seem to care about steroids in football.
Fans just assume that guys who can run 4.4 40’s and bench 500 pounds are all natural, but if you hit over 40 homers in a season, you are automatically under suspicion.
Excuses are made for HGH users, the same for Harrison as Ankiel, they “only” took the HGH to recover faster from injuries. But, it is a banned substance that alters your body.
Sure, drugs have been common in sports for a long time. But, none influence every aspect of the game like steroids. If taken correctly, an athlete’s body and reactions can completely change. Steriods have become the ultimate in cheating in any sport.
Performance-enhancing drugs are wrong in any sport, but fans need to realize that their perceptions of sports and athletes are coloring their judgments of players.
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