I'm a proud DU graduate, no question. I loved every day I spent at the University of Denver, and having a Frozen Four contender year after year made it easy to follow college hockey. Truth is, the Pioneers have put together one of the best athletic programs in the nation. 28 National Championships is no easy feat (even if they're only in Hockey and Skiing), and watching the resurgence of Men's hoops and Lacrosse has be unreal. We even got an opportunity this year to play in a conference that fields teams in our own time-zone.
With this kind of momentum, what better time to bring back DU football? Let's look first at the objections, and through the magic of my words, you'll see that they're really irrelevant:
1: A football program costs too much money to maintain
The University of Denver left the gridiron in 1961 for "financial reasons," hoping to pour more resources into academics, but those were very different days. The lifeblood of a Division I athletic program is the revenue generated by the football team. If fans are willing to camp out all night for Hockey season tickets, you better believe you'd be selling out games for a new football team.
Denver won't need to build a stadium; between the facilities at Dick's Sporting Goods Park (capacity: 18,000) and Denver Coliseum (capacity: 10,200), you've got two perfectly suitable short-term solutions, and I don't think you'd be hard-pressed to find a few donors who would be willing to beef up Peter Barton Lacrosse Stadium's capacity to somewhere near 10,000.
2. DU couldn't be competitive with established D-I teams.
Why not? A Lacrosse powerhouse west of the Mississippi was laughable ten years ago, but coaching legend Bill Tierney saw the coaching position as an opportunity to blaze a trail. There are plenty of great coordinators out there who would jump at the idea of kick-starting a brand new program.
Start in the FCS for the first 2-3 years. We'd get our bell rung by perennial contenders like Montana or North Dakota State, but after a few away games at schools like Oregon, USC, or Texas, we'd be bringing in hefty bags filled with hundred-dollar bills earmarked for improvements to the team's facilities. Why do you think mid-majors schedule those games? They're easy money, and they get the team experience playing against the nation's best. Schedule one or two a year, and DU could be playing in the WAC (competitively) in five years.
3. When the superconferences form, the mid-majors will be irrelevant in five years.
Where most people see a problem, I see an opportunity. Mid-major conferences are going to need to get creative to stay relevant. They're going to lose teams like Boise State, TCU, and Utah, but others will step up and take their place.
Emulation is the most sincere form of flattery, and I'd bet money that the mid-major conferences (WAC, Mountain West, MAC, C-USA, even the lowly Sun Belt) will start to merge and trade teams to keep up with the PAC-16's and Big 20's of the world. DU would fit perfectly into the long-term vision of D-I football, providing a large television market for the seemingly small-time conference.
4. Outside of DU grads, who gives a rat's ass about DU? CU and CSU already have the Colorado market on lock-down.
My counter: "Outside of Boise State grads, who gives a rat's ass about Boise State? Idaho already has that state on lockdown." 15 years ago, the BCS-busting Broncos were a D-II program overshadowed by the larger and more well-established University of Idaho. Add a great coach and some blue turf, and you have one of the most infamous programs in the nation less than two decades later. Hell, that same coach is probably dying to get back to Colorado (Dan Hawkins)...actually, let's not open that Pandora's box. But you get my point. There's plenty of room to share in Colorado.
5. DU is too small to support a D-I football program.
I am, and always will be, a true believer in the term, "size doesn't matter." (insert double-entendre reference here). Denver can't claim to be a big school, but that hasn't stopped other programs from being successful. Marshall (enrollment: 9,692), Tulsa (enrollment: 2,987), and SMU (enrollment: 7,000) all have respectable programs, and Northwestern (enrollment: 8,425) and Wake Forest (enrollment: 4,412) hold their own in supposed power conferences. At 5,455 students, DU has no reason to use size as a deterrent to get in the game.
The University of Denver is very proud of it's heritage. From the first day of freshman orientation, students are taught to have pride in their school, to support their athletes, and to represent the greatest state in the nation with dignity and passion. Bringing football back to DU can only add to the pride we, as graduates, feel for our university. I'll even throw in five or ten bucks if it helps get the ball rolling.
D-rah, E-rah, N-rah V-E-R Boom.
-Sam
