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(Tenured Radical)

Friday, March 17, 2006

But Don’t Listen To Me.
Listen to Someone Who’s There.


The Fort Wayne Journal Gazette:



“Not only are we in Division I, but probably over the next 12 months, we’ll be in a conference.”
– [Athletic Director] Walt Bowman, January 2001


Ah, Walt. Your mailing address always was Somewhere Over The Rainbow, USA.

You spun your fantasies and fed us your cotton candy and curled your upper lip at all the sober-sides who tried to tell you that, on the far side of cotton candy, you’ll generally find the mother of all bellyaches.

None of it mattered, as far as you were concerned. It was so much background noise in the headlong rush to take IPFW Division I.

“Sure they have some concerns,” you said airily that day five years ago, before traipsing off into more reveries about rivers of money and conferences lining up like eager suitors.

“And while I understand their concerns, I don’t think they’ve paid enough attention to what we’re doing here.”

“They” being the Budgetary Affairs Subcommittee at [Indiana University-Purdue University Fort Wayne].

The concerns being that IPFW needed to take a step back and draw a deep breath before plunging headfirst into Division I, because the money wasn’t there to do it.

Bowman, the athletic director at the time, all but laughed.




God bless you, Walt. But you had a pixie’s grasp on reality then, and nothing that’s happened since has done anything to alter that perception.

And so when it came out this week that IPFW is spending almost twice as much on D-I athletics as was originally projected, prompting a vote from the Faculty Senate to discuss … well, something, at some point … it did not exactly come as news. Unless you count as news that business about the Titanic.

I heard it hit an iceberg. And sank.

“Most universities don’t make money off athletics, and IPFW is no exception,” Brian Fife, chairman of the BAS, said this week, stating the obvious.

Well, duh. The lower tiers of Division I, after all, are stuffed with schools that, having jumped in with visions of March sugar plums dancing in their heads, are now backstroking in red ink. And IPFW was somehow supposed to be different? Particularly when it took the plunge without a conference?




…So what happens next?

Well, you can’t put the toothpaste back in the tube, that’s for sure. Brian Fife suggested this week the Faculty Senate might decide that IPFW needs to get out of Division I, but that’s not going to happen.