It seems that the University of North Carolina Wilmington has everything a college student could ask for: the beach, great academic programs such as nursing, film studies, creative writing, education, business, and it has a Costco nearby.
However, UNCW is missing something that 625 other universities have: a football team. Football is one of America’s greatest sports. The Super Bowl, football’s biggest game, holds the record as the most watched event in world history.
So why is UNCW missing this? It’s all about the dollar signs.
Joe Browning has been UNCW’s Senior Associate Athletic Director for 27 years. He deals with communications and oversees the budget for the athletic department. He explains that there are many reasons why UNCW doesn’t have a football team, but the primary one is purely finances.
“If you survey everyone in our department, which is 75 employees, all of us would love to have football here,” Browning said. “It’s the most popular sport in America, which makes us feel worse about not having it at this school. To start up a football team the right way, it would probably cost about $50 million. There are a lot of things that people don’t see within the football costs.”
In order to break down the cost to create a football program, the university would have to deal with building a new stadium, practice facilities, supplying equipment, hiring a coaching staff and trainers. So the university will have to deal with all of those salaries and benefits. Equipment alone would cost $250 to $300 per person. There are also the travel expenses if the team wants to go play football at other stadiums during the season. Then there are scholarships. If the school comes in at the FCS level (Division 1AA), that’s supplying 63 scholarships to student athletes.
“Our main goal right now for the athletic department is to fully fund all of our sports here at UNCW,” Browning said. “Right now we can only fully fund men’s and women’s basketball. We would like to fully fund all of our sports before we can add in football.”
UNCW has 19 sports programs, but only three of them are fully funded (the third is baseball). In the CAA, UNCW has the lowest percentage of fully funded teams (16 percent) behind the University of Delaware and 50 percent of their sports programs are fully funded. UNCW also has the lowest athletic budget in the CAA at $10.5 million a year. The next lowest athletic budget in the CAA is Old Dominion University with an estimated $27 million per year and they have a football team. Another small school that just recently added a football team is UNC-Charlotte, but Browning brings up a point that also helps college programs acquire football teams.
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