Temple drops seven intercollegiate sports

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Football is everything.

At least that's the message Temple sent today with the school's announcement that it's cutting seven of its 24 intercollegiate sports: baseball, softball, men's crew, women's rowing, men's gymnastics and men's indoor/outdoor track & field, effective July 1.

According to The Temple News, the cuts were described by officials as a culmination of the university’s long history of a underfunded athletic department. Reportedly, the cuts will save the university an estimated $3 million to $3.5 million out of its $44 million budget.

Temple Athletic Director Kevin Clark said that the decision to drop five men's sports concerned Temple's ratio of male/female student-athletes. Title IX requires that the male to female student-athlete ratio remains relatively close to the normal student body. Before the cuts, the ratio was approximately 58 percent men to 42 percent women and should now be closer to an even split with today's cuts.

Clark also shot down the notion that the cuts were made to redirect money into the school's football program, but there's no doubt Temple has doubled down on football since getting booted out of the Big East after the 2004 season. The Owls remained as an independent at that point, only to rejoin the Big East last season when the conference was desperate to take anyone thanks to NCAA mass realignment issues.

And then last month, Temple president Neil Theobald said that an on-campus football stadium would likely be part of the university's 2014 masterplan, even floating the possibility of sharing space with Penn at Franklin Field.   

Now close to 150 Temple student-athletes and nine full-time coaches have learned that when it comes to the lucrative cash cow that is college football, it takes big money to make big money.

As one of the Owls' biggest city rivals, Penn has faced off with Temple in several of the latter's newly cut sports in the last few years, including men's track & field this past season, women's soccer last season and baseball and softball in 2012.

While The DP noted last month that Penn Athletics is increasingly reliant on philanthropy rather than university funding, Penn isn't anywhere near Temple Athletics's program-cutting crisis right now financially, thanks to the recently completed $125 million Campaign for Penn Athletics.  

Still, Temple's cuts to several high-profile programs - a Temple rower had participated in every Olympics from 1992 to 2008, for example - make it even more clear that Division I Sports is an all too bloated destination for state taxpayers and alumni donations. The Knight Commission's report this week that athletic spending per athlete grew at a faster rate than academic spending per student in every Division I subdivision from 2005-11 isn't a surprise. Even less surprising was the commission's finding that that gap between athletic and academic spending was smallest at schools without football.

Trend or no trend, today's the day that far too many sports died at Temple.