Football has never been a big deal at Northeastern. Still, it’s a surprise to see the program canceled just a couple of years after it survived a major review. (Huntington News coverage; Boston Globe story and Dan Shaughnessy column; Boston Herald story.)
From my parochial perspective, I feel bad that aspiring sportswriters in our School of Journalism will no longer have a football team to cover. Yes, there will still be plenty of sports news. But football is a big part of what our student newspaper, the Huntington News, does every fall.
I’m not just an employee of Northeastern; I’m also an alumnus. During the 1970s, when I was a student, I probably went to three or four football games, either as a member of the band or to tag along with the future Mrs. Media Nation, a photographer for the News.
As Northeastern has become more of a residential university, sports in general have become more important on campus. Football, though, could never compete — certainly not with the hockey program.
Ironically, I went to graduate school at Boston University, which canceled its own football program more than a decade ago. (Honest — it’s not my fault.)
I guess the lesson is that football is so expensive that if you can’t do it big, like Boston College, you shouldn’t do it at all.
