Athletics Director on Football Program: 'I Think It's Going To Happen'

(Source: Al Case via Flickr)

Will UT-Tyler get a football team?

“I think it’s gonna happen,” Vice President for Athletics at UT-Tyler Howard Patterson told KVUT in an interview on Feb. 9. “I just don’t think it it's going to be in the near future or possibly not even [in] this decade.”

Patterson said that infrastructure and finances are some of the main obstacles to a football team at UT-Tyler at this time.

Here’s his full response:

To start an NCAA Division 2 football program, you probably need five years of ‘okay, we’re gonna do it’ and five years from now we play our first intercollegiate competition. So you’ve got to hire coaches. You’ve got to do recruiting. You’ve got to recruit [the] leadership class that will be the leaders the next year when you actually start playing, and not to mention $60 million in facilities. That’s the big part. (And that’s an old figure, too. It used to be 50. I think it’s at least 60 now or maybe more.)

But we have no locker rooms. We have no storage area, no playing field, no practice field. There’s just--there's nothing there, and you have to build all of that. You can hire the head coach, and the offensive and defensive coordinators prior to the facilities being done, but by the time you bring in your first leadership class--they may be 28 (and I’m just throwing a number out) student athletes--they’ve got to have a place to practice. And although they’re not competing that year, they’ve still got to practice and learn the type of systems that the coaches want them to learn so that when you bring everybody else the next year you’ve got players on the field who can be coaches, in a sense, on the field.

So it’s a long process. It’s a very expensive process. It would, I believe, probably increase enrollment by 500 students within those five years. I think you would see that enrollment, but you’re also spending a lot of money, as well.

So there you have it: an answer to the football program question from Patterson.

Visit KVUT's website for Patterson’s full interview. 

What do you think? Should UT-Tyler add a football program? What about the costs? Comment your thoughts below.

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Twitter: @jhescock12

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