Whittier College May Bring Back Poets Football

Adding football always feels agreeable on the surface, but what does the larger situation look like?

On the back of announcing Dr. Kristine E. Dillon as the new President of Whittier College, the door has been opened for the return of football to the Poets’ Athletic Department.

Enrollment has been in a tailspin over the past few years, and as of 2022/23 - the final year of their original football program - it had dropped nearly 38% from 2019/20 levels (This is based off Full-Time Equivalents as reported by the school). They had emerged as the one D3 school between the NWC and SCIAC to appear to truly be in danger of closing due to enrollment and so many alumni were upset about what was happening to their school that they petitioned for their President to step down or be removed.

And so Linda Oubré did step down at the conclusion of the 2022/23 academic year from her position of President, while Dr. Dillon assumed the role in the interim for the past year before being named in a permanent capacity on May 10, 2024.

Restoring enrollment is the top priority for the school at this time, but that is a function of a number of factors, and not a singular item on the agenda.

There is hope that the change in leadership will silence the bidirectional vitriol that existed between the organization Save Whittier College and Linda Oubré. A calmed alumni base should allow Dr. Dillon to make incremental improvements without constant scrutiny.

Although there are concerns around the enrollment cliff, the schools of the SCIAC sit in a somewhat advantageous position compared to similar D3 institutions of the Northeast and Midwest. There are not many schools at the D3 level in the region, and all members of the conference have an air of history and status that younger institutions have not yet acquired.

But will reintroducing football help or hinder the efforts to stabilize the school's finances and enrollment?

The forward-looking fundraising goal of $250,000 is not a terribly large amount of money for an established college with a healthy donor base. This goal should be a reasonable litmus test of the actual interest in restoring the football program at Whittier.

Their reported Football expenses in 2022 leading into the program being shut down were significantly lower than their historical average with a total outlay of only $183,000 with $60,000 of that as Operating Expenses. For 2018, 2019, and 2021 the program averaged closer to $430,000 in Total Expenses with Operating Expenses of $113,000. The tightly regional nature of the SCIAC is a clear advantage as it is common to see same-day travel to their road games.

However, across the rest of the SCIAC, the average annual expense attributed to their football program in 2022 was closer to $700,000. Inflation is a problem and decisions will need to be made to manage those expenses.

If the program alone can bring in 80 individuals who would have otherwise gone elsewhere, it is not unreasonable to infer that they would bring in around $1,600,000 in revenue to the school. That additional enrollment may be optimistic, but I think it is likely that a football team would end up being self-sufficient.

It is hard to say how a football program might affect enrollment of students who won't be involved with the program, but to be without football tends to position a school as being somewhat lesser than their conference-mates unless their athletic program has clear regional superiority in Basketball, Baseball, or Softball.

As for how a team would fit into the SCIAC, I am not a fan of the conference operating with 7 teams.

This past season felt like it went well using pods/divisions to turn a 6-member conference into 8 conference games, but adding a 7th program would unbalance that system, and a single round-robin schedule would result in only 6 conference games as well as a rolling bye week which is also not ideal.

A perfect situation would be to have Occidental restart their football program at the same time as Whittier to bring the SCIAC back to 8 Football members. This would give them the same structure as the Northwest Conference with the potential to have all 24 potential out-of-conference games filled by each other.

Both conferences have a history of playing non-conference designated games against in-conference competition, but this is far from preferable.

As the prospects for small liberal arts colleges gets more difficult it will help if the two conferences can communicate on a closer level than they already do to ensure lower cost scheduling for their members.

Of course, scheduling games against schools across the Upper Midwest and Texas should still be possible, but an attempt to coordinate that volume between the two bodies should help stabilize scheduling.

This will lead to the ideal scheduling model of playing their OOC schedule across the first 3 Saturdays of September, a collective bye week to reset, then their 7-game conference schedule.

But in a vacuum, I do conclude that Whittier is most likely better off having a football program, though the program was not in a great place through the 2010s. Should this plan play out, they'll need to search far and wide to find a coach that can bring a SCIAC Championship to Whittier.

As for Occidental, their decision to end their football program was clouded by pandemic-based logic, but the numbers say to me that they too would likely benefit from a return to football.

The SCIAC is a great conference of history, regionality, and high academic standards that should embrace full athletic participation from all its members. The furthest travel between football stadiums within the conference is only approximately 120 miles between Cal Lutheran and Redlands. This is a huge luxury to keep travel costs down and embrace varsity competition.

The future may be difficult for schools like Whittier, but reducing the number of opportunities for prospective students is not the way to maintain sustainable enrollment.