There are no postseason rewards for this eight-win football team, no playoff invitations or bowl games.
The USD football team will call it a season today after playing UC Davis in its finale at Torero Stadium. The coaching staff will go back to work preparing for next year. Returning players get their lives back, if only for a couple of months. And graduating seniors will begin a life without football, save the two or three with professional aspirations.
For the past half-decade, the Toreros have been one of the winningest Football Championship Subdivision programs. But because they are nonscholarship, they have little to show for it other than a winning record and a sense of accomplishment.
Annually snubbed from the postseason and scarred with a stigma, their reward is a final game against Davis, the only scholarship program they play this year. It's a measuring stick for where the Toreros are – but more importantly, where they want to be.
The stigma
Most nonscholarship football players fall into three categories: 1) Those injured in high school who are placed on the physically unable to impress list, 2) those with late growth spurts who pack on height and weight between high school and college, and 3) those who, harsh as it may seem, just don't have the talent, size, athleticism, skill (take your pick) to play scholarship football. Not every high school quarterback can be 6-foot-4, 210 pounds with a sidewinder missile for an arm.
“We're not going to get the finished product that maybe a Division I school will get,” USD coach Ron Caragher said. “They have the luxury to pick and choose.”
Ben Hannula, regarded as one of the most versatile athletes in the Pioneer Football League, was rated as the No. 6 high school recruit in the state of Washington as a junior. But an injury his senior year left Pac-10 suitors such as Washington looking elsewhere. Hannula declined a scholarship to Montana State to come to San Diego.
Wide receiver John Matthews, a fifth-year senior who has drawn NFL interest, said being nonscholarship is another obstacle he'll have to face to impress scouts.
“On paper, you look at a guy who is playing nonscholarship and the automatic assumption is he couldn't get a scholarship,” Matthews said. “Some guys it's true, some it isn't. Is it fair? I don't know. It's just the nature of the beast.”
Money matters
Money doesn't just talk in college football, it shrieks. And with a one-year USD tuition of $46,134 (including food and housing), the financial cost is significant. For the football team to go scholarship, USD would have to stay compatible with Title IX and offer the same number of scholarships to female athletes.
“It's not a simple formula,” said USD Executive Director of Athletics Ky Snyder. “I think from where we are as a university right now, our enrollment, the endowment, I think we're at the right place for us right now. Schools like ours have dropped football, yet we're the ones succeeding at it.”
A Division I-A (FBS) team can have 25 new scholarships a year with no more than 85 on a roster. If USD went scholarship, it would be a $7.8 million annual commitment taking Title IX into account.
That doesn't mean it sits well with the players. J.T. Rogan, who missed this year because of an injury in the first game and faces an uphill battle to gain a sixth-year of eligibility from the NCAA, said the limitations can be frustrating.
“Naturally, we'd like to have scholarships,” he said. “We'd love to have a huge school atmosphere. But we understand it's not available and we make do with what we've got. It's just a lot of guys who love to play football.”
Caragher said he hopes someday that will change.
“It would be a great setting and a great place for it to happen,” he said. “Financing it is a big part. What conference do you join? But our players work as hard as every other sport on our campus. But nonscholarship football certainly beats dropping the program all together.”
Breaking the ceiling
Just as money factors in to USD staying nonscholarship, it's also the reason USD and every other Pioneer Football League team has been absent from the FCS playoffs since the league's inception in 1993.
“The bias comes from university presidents that are saying, 'We're investing all this money in our program. We therefore have more right to make the playoffs than you nonscholarship schools,' ” Caragher explained. “My attitude is it doesn't matter how much you invest in your program. It's how good your team is.”
And the Toreros are good. Since 2005, USD has gone 39-6 and won three PFL titles. However the PFL does not have an automatic berth in the FCS playoffs. While that's not likely to change, hope is on the horizon.
Starting in 2010, the FCS will expand the playoff format from 16 to 20 teams. Currently, the playoffs include eight conference champions with automatic qualifiers and eight at-large bids. The Northeast Conference and Big South will be awarded automatic qualifiers in 2010 plus two additional at-large berths will be given.
The irony? Two years ago, the Northeast and PFL instituted the Gridiron Bowl, an exempted postseason game matching the league champs. The PFL is 2-0 against the NEC, which will have an automatic qualifier.
Snyder said more games against stiffer competition is on the horizon.
“They've laid out some parameters that show us what we need to do scheduling-wise in order to take away the arguments of keeping us out,” he said. “I think there is a growing acceptance that if we can play at that level, we should be invited to the playoffs.”
Until that day, the players will keep putting in the work.
“We feel like we have to go undefeated for three straight years just to get the NCAA to recognize us,” said redshirt sophomore defensive back Gabe Derricks. “If that's what we have to do, that's what we'll do. For us, we have to treat every game like it's a bowl game.”
Kevin Gemmell: (619) 718-5304; kevin.gemmell@uniontrib.com
