A Gridiron History

Years before all the rave about lacrosse, the University of Tampa actually had a football team.

Not only was there a team, but the team was the face of the university.  “The president back then (B.D. Owens) didn’t like that the football team was the tail wagging the dog,” said UT Athletic Director Larry Marfise.  “In other words, the school was known for football and not academics.”

Owens was the president of UT when the school decided to drop the program that had been in existence since 1933.
Excluding their final season in 1974, the Spartans boasted an all-time regular season record of 191-155-12.  They earned bids to four Bowl Games- the 1951 Beach Bowl, 1952 and 1954 Cigar Bowls and the 1972 Tangerine Bowl- and won them all.

The Spartans played and beat powerhouses like Florida State University and the University of Miami. This was before there was Division I and Division II. The small private university was playing many teams that would go on to become D-I goliaths.

The Spartans produced players like defensive end John Matuszak, who was selected first overall by the Houston Oilers in the 1973 NFL Draft. But possibly the best athlete ever to come to UT was “Fabulous” Freddie Solomon, who went on to win two Super Bowl rings with the San Francisco 49ers, and whom passed away in February.

There were many reasons that the school decided to cut the program after the 1974 season. For one thing, football is an expensive sport for a university to have.

“Of the 55 players, 31 (of them), or over 50 percent, were in academic trouble, but of the non-football students, only 15 percent were in trouble.  Finally, [President B.D.] Owens stressed the following points: The university had taken $755,000 out of reserves during the past three years to meet deficits and, if football continued, the endowment would be finished,” Marfise said. “If matters continued in the same pattern, in three years, the university would become bankrupt, or part of the state system.”  “There was some talk of bad characters on the team,” he added.

Former athletic director Sam Bailey was passionate about keeping the football team, but he was ultimately ignored and then fired.

“Sam Bailey coached every sport we ever had at one point,” said Marfise.  “He even set up a schedule for the 1975 season that would get the school a lot of money back.  He was shocked the board of trustees agreed to cutting football.”
Cutting the program was a desperate move. But enrollment actually did not plummet once UT dropped the football team.

“From looking at the numbers, it doesn’t look like the university took a huge hit in the 70s,” said Ricardo Rosario, staff assistant at the Registrar’s office. “There was actually a significant increase in 1977.”
In 1975, the last year of football at UT, there were 1,635 total full-time students at the university, and although it dropped a bit to 1,586 in 1976, the next year it rose to 1,739.  Enrollment numbers flirted just below the 2,000 mark until President Vaughn took over in 1995 when enrollment began consistently increasing.

However, the year after cutting the football team, Owens was fired as president. There were rumors swirling that he was offered money by the Buccaneers to drop the program to prevent competition for the professional team. As of March 29, the Buccaneers’ public relations department did not return comment in relation to this story.

The school lost prestige as a private university, because football was so attractive to so many prospective students.  “If Boise State dropped their football program, they would still be OK because they’re a state school,” said Marfise.  “But as a private school, it really hurt our enrollment.”

In 1975, there were no professional sports teams in Tampa. People would flock to see the Spartans play at Tampa Stadium.  In 1976, Tampa Stadium would become the home of the Bucs.
There were several attempts to bring football back to UT, but none were successful. There are a lot of positives and negatives to having a football team.  It increases school spirit and is the best tailgating sport.  It also is a great sport for alumni support.

However, having a football team requires money and space – lots of space. “If we were to have a football team now, we would need two fields dedicated to only football,” Marfise said.  “We would need huge locker rooms to support the large teams and plenty more offices for all of the coaches.  It’s just not cost efficient.”

“There are 119 Division I BCS schools,” said Dr. Ronald Woods, professor of the course Sports and Society at UT. “Ten to 15 of those make money on their football teams, and that’s mainly because of television contracts and season tickets.  Every other school loses money. We couldn’t get a television contract and would struggle to sell tickets.

“It’s much harder to build a successful football program with many other schools and teams around,” Woods continued. “For instance, Temple University is in the heart of Philadelphia. The Eagles are so close so it’s hard to attract fans to the games. However, somewhere like Penn State, that’s 200 miles from anything so they have no problem getting fans.”

Woods provided a possible solution. “I believe you would get the same notoriety by putting more money into men’s and women’s basketball,” he said. “Basketball is much more cost efficient than football and still has very high popularity.”
There is currently only one school in UT’s athletic conference, the Sunshine State Conference, that has a football team, Florida Tech, and they added it in 2010.

It’s not football, but UT instead chose to add lacrosse this year. “Lacrosse is nowhere near as expensive as football,” said Marfise. “It still brings in males and more students from the northeast, where lacrosse is extremely popular and where we like to recruit a lot of students from.”

Marfise is still hopeful that one day UT will bring football back. “I would love to see it back here again, although I doubt it will happen in my lifetime,” he said. “It would probably have to be at the Division II, non-scholarship level and would have to be student-funded.”

Here’s a thought: how much extra money would you be willing to spend on tuition per year to bring a football team back to UT?