I can remember a time when Rutgers had over 30 varsity sports….but I’m old
I am a Rutgers letterwinner.
In the fall of 1971, I was sitting around WRSU, the student station at Rutgers. A fellow radio person came in and said he had just signed up to play lightweight football.
I don’t think I even knew it existed. A sport that had been at Rutgers since 1934, and actually won league titles, was a mystery to me. I decided to walk over to the College Avenue Gym and find out more. I ended up signing up; my WRSU colleague never showed up at a team meeting again.
At 5’6”, I played
offensive tackle and on the defensive line during my final two years at Rutgers. But this was lightweight – or 150-pound – football. I played games at Army, Navy, Princeton, Cornell, Columbia, and Penn; I got a “rug burn” playing on the newly created artificial turf installed at Franklin Field. And I recovered a fumble against Princeton.
I am a Rutgers letterwinner.
That’s me – after the Penn game at the “old” Rutgers Stadium
A letterwinner for a sport that doesn’t exist anymore, at least not at Rutgers. In 1989, the decision was made to drop the sport, a decision that Columbia had already made years earlier. A decision that Princeton made a few years back. At Princeton, the call was made because the numbers weren’t adequate to properly field a team. At Rutgers, it was mostly financial.
It was the same reason that then-athletic director Bob Mulcahy used when at the end of the 2006-07 school year, it was announced that the University was dropping six sports: men’s heavyweight crew, men’s lightweight crew, men’s fencing, women’s fencing, men’s swimming and diving and men’s tennis.
That year, there were University-wide cuts because of budget constraints. But, for many, including this writer, it seemed like an easy out to eliminate the cost of a few sports in order to “fix” football. When Mulcahy was fired in 2008, it was determined that there was some unreported moving of funds, and that the cutting of the six sports ended up simply moving the money to football.
There were stories circulating at the time of those other sports’ demise, stories indicating that wrestling was also on the chopping block. Some thought that when John Sacchi decided to step down as coach in 2007, it was going to be the convenient time to cut the program.
It didn’t happen. Thankfully.
But the same can’t be said at other schools. Some accounts put the number of eliminated wrestling programs at 350 since the 1970s. Today, Division I has just 79 NCAA programs with 64 in Division II. Division III, where there technically are no athletic scholarships and smaller budgets, has over 100. But that’s just wrestling.
Title IX, requiring some equity for women’s sports, caused many schools to eliminate sports over the last 50 or so years. And the Covid pandemic in 2020 wasn’t necessarily the ultimate cause, but many schools dropped athletic programs during that period, as well. Between March and November 2020, some 352 sports were cut, the vast majority being Olympic/non-revenue sports. And 2025 was brutal, as scores of colleges dropped any number of sports or their entire athletic program. Some schools, not necessarily because of the House settlement, closed entirely. Many of these were at DII, DIII, or NAIA schools. But at D1, where the settlement really impacts budgets, there were at least 40 sports announced as being eliminated, though none in football or basketball.
Is this a sustainable situation? We’re well aware of Rutgers’, how shall I say this, precarious finances. But there are other Division I schools that have to be looking at their budgets, at the need for paying athletes (or watch them go elsewhere for a big payday), thinking whether they can ask donors or local businesses for even more in order to keep the lights on and sports operating. How much strain can a college’s – and its athletic arm’s – budget take before the actual reason the school exists is in question? Can we have high level athletic programs, run an educational enterprise, and still balance the budget?
In the next installment of Can They Afford It? The Crushing Weight of Funding Modern College Athletics, we’ll take a look at Playing sports while finding a cure for cancer.
