The Sports Arsenal

This post basically serves to review and comment on an article published in The Post and Courier on Saturday, October 12. The writer of the story is Andrew Miller, regular P+C beat writer for The Citadel’s football program.

I appreciated this article. I don’t necessarily agree with everything stated in the piece, though most of those points of contention emanate from people quoted in the story, not Miller himself. I do quibble with certain aspects of the article that I think needed to include alternative, on-record opinions. There was also one “factoid” in the piece which was monumentally misleading. I’ll address that later.

Having said that, I was glad to see the feature published. It brings up multiple issues facing The Citadel and its department of athletics, all of which richly deserve public scrutiny.

I would encourage anyone at all interested in The Citadel to read the article.

I’ll break down my commentary by each portion of the story (excluding the introductory section).

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The bottom line

The athletic department is projected to lose nearly $2 million this year…[Operating expenses] in the 2021-22 academic year amounted to $3.2 million. The projected operational budget for this year is expected to be $5.5 million, or an increase of 71 percent.

Two different sources told Andrew Miller that the department of athletics is undergoing budget and scholarship cuts — but this was denied by Gen. Walters. That is more than a little curious.

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Along those lines, there is something else worth noting that is not in the article.

If you go to the webpage for The Citadel’s Procurement Services Department, you will find a link to the school’s “Awards” site for procurement. This includes solicitations, sole sources, and the occasional emergency purchase.

It can be an interesting site to follow. Those perusing the page will see that The Citadel has a sole source justification for SoCon-mandated baseballs, for example, and will notice that the league also requires a specific vendor for video database and data analysis software.

The site also has a link to a sole source for a “Financial Consultant”. The advertisement for this sole source was posted on June 13 (expiring two weeks later). The school listed a potential contract amount of $250,000 (over the course of one year) for “a financial consultant to advise and assist in financial planning.”

That is a very generic description, but the person named as the sole source, Rick Kelly, is not generic at all. He is a former executive director of the S.C. Budget and Control Board, and later served as the Chief Financial Officer at the University of South Carolina. Kelly is an auditor by trade and has actually been hired as a consultant by The Citadel before (in July of 2020).

It is my understanding that Kelly recently completed an audit of The Citadel’s department of athletics, and that his findings are to be presented to the Board of Visitors in the near future — perhaps as soon as the BOV’s next scheduled meeting.

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Revenue sources

Walters hopes to renew a series of outdoor concerts at Johnson Hagood Stadium, which had been put on hold after complaints by local residents who feared the added traffic and noise.

Then there’s naming rights to the playing field and stadium that could bring in money.

Remember, The Citadel was not successful in its June appeal to the City of Charleston’s Board of Zoning Appeals for approval for the outdoor series. The school was defeated by a combination of NIMBY-ism and an unfriendly zoning board (the vote was 7-0 against The Citadel).

Of course, the board couldn’t outright tell the military college that any concerts at Johnson Hagood Stadium are off the table. Otherwise, other neighborhoods could presumably block similar events at venues all over the city (as The Citadel’s VP for communications noted in the linked article). However, it is reasonable to expect that the same people who opposed the concert series will continue to fight against any major events held at the stadium, so relying on that as a regular source of income might be a dicey proposition.

It seems to me that profiting off naming rights to the stadium would also be hard to accomplish. You can’t rename Johnson Hagood Stadium right now without violating the state’s Heritage Act (unless two-thirds of state lawmakers could be convinced to approve a name change; good luck with that).

Until or unless the Heritage Act is successfully challenged in court, I’m not sure what The Citadel can do. And even if that were to happen, it is possible potential candidates for naming rights (banks, grocery stores, etc.) would be hesitant to be the “replacement” name under those circumstances.

The NCAA settlement [the “House” case] and what it will mean for The Citadel has been one of the many reasons for the delay in finishing the east side stands at Johnson Hagood Stadium...But the pandemic and other delays, including funding for the $5 million project, have postponed construction.

Capaccio said he hopes to have the east side stands ready for the 2025 football season.

“We have more than $3 million on hand and more than enough pledges to cover the rest,” Walters said.

I would be very pleasantly surprised if the rebuilt East stands are ready by the time the 2025 football campaign rolls around. The first game of the season next year is a home game on August 30 against North Dakota State.

It would be nice if the stadium were ready when the Bison’s travelling supporters arrive in Charleston. I just find that timeline hard to believe, particularly given the history of the project. I will be happy if my skepticism is unfounded.

Another thing worth mentioning is that the phrase “many reasons for the delay” is doing a lot of work in that paragraph. There seems to be a lag of about a year in the overall approval process which cannot be easily explained by COVID-19, related construction issues, or general fundraising.

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Moving on down

One of the biggest fears from alumni is that the administration and athletic department will grow weary of the constant losing and financial struggles and decide to drop down to Division II or even Division III, where no athletic scholarships are awarded, to save money and be more competitive…

Walters said there’s no plan to move down in classifications.

“Not on my watch,” he said. “We’re not going Division II.”

Here, at least, there appears to be near-unanimity on a topic, and I was glad to see it. Dropping down a division (or two) would be a terrible idea on a lot of levels, and also completely unnecessary.

Besides the likely exodus of donors mentioned in the story, Division III makes no sense from a geographic perspective. What schools would The Citadel even play? There are no D3 football schools in South Carolina. There are two in Georgia — Berry and LaGrange. The North Carolina institutions with D3 football programs are Brevard, Greensboro College, Guilford, Methodist, and North Carolina Wesleyan.

That obviously wouldn’t work for The Citadel.

As for Division II, I get the impression that more schools are trying to leave that tier than move to it. And here again, the list of local institutions in the division do not as a group “match up” with The Citadel from a historical or practical standpoint. (D2 football schools in South Carolina: Allen, Benedict, Erskine, Limestone, Newberry, North Greenville.)

In terms of dropping down, VMI actually did something similar (at least philosophically) at the beginning of the century when it left the SoCon to join the Big South. That move did not work out for the folks in Lexington, VA, and they were thrilled to be able to re-join the Southern Conference after a decade out in the cold.

Now, there is a facet to this worth discussing. It is possible that in the future The Citadel’s athletics programs could be in a tier called “Division II” that would actually mostly resemble the current Division I. If there is a breakaway from the NCAA of 20-40 schools (the inevitable “Superleague”) for football and a slightly larger number of institutions for basketball (50-70, perhaps), then the eventual NCAA setup could look like this (at least for football):

• Division I — P4 schools left out of the Superleague, the majority of G5 schools, maybe a few FCS institutions with historic success and decent revenue potential (the Montana and Dakota schools, for example)
• Division II — The vast majority of FCS, plus a few G5 schools that still want to play football but would not be in an ideal financial position in the new order of college athletics

There wouldn’t be any problem with The Citadel being in that type of Division II. It would still likely play the same schools as before. It is just a question of nomenclature. There would also be an opportunity to play the “Division I” schools, as is the case now.

In that system, schools could compete in a revised D1 in basketball, baseball, and any other sport in which they wished to do so, and the remainder of their varsity teams would play in a D2 with fewer financial and infrastructure commitments.

That could wind up being just fine for a school like The Citadel.

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Transfer portal, NIL, and non-cadet athletes

I’m going to split this section, separating NIL from the other two listed issues.

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As for NIL:

Some Citadel alumni are against NIL, but barring athletes from making deals with local businesses would be against the law.

“Sometimes we’re our own worst enemy,” [former Bulldogs quarterback and past BOV member Jack Douglas] said. “We can’t get out of our own way. We need to be more welcoming to people and businesses. The gates around the campus aren’t there to keep people out, it’s to keep the cadets in. We’re not taking advantage of some of the resources in Charleston, people and businesses that don’t really have a connection to the school but could be friendly to us and help us out.”

One of those alumni who might have a problem with NIL, however, is the school president. From the minutes of the Board of Visitors meeting on April 24, 2024:

[Walters] then discussed the impact of the current rules/laws on the Southern Conference (SoCon) and The Citadel. He stated there has been little impact to date for The Citadel with only a few athletes participating. Of those, only one currently receives monetary compensation. The others receive products for their endorsements.

He stated that although The Citadel, the SoCon, or the NCAA cannot prohibit an athlete from entering NIL contracts, The Citadel can and will develop a policy that will impose limitations on its student athletes. Among the limitations discussed:

• Specific prohibitions on when and where student athletes can appear in advertisements for third parties.
• Prohibit student athletes from appearing in NIL opportunities while wearing team jerseys.
• Prohibit student athletes from endorsing tobacco, alcohol, illegal substances or activities, banned athletic substances, and gambling, including but not limited to sports betting.
• Prohibit endorsement of products which compete with school sponsorship agreements or contracts.

It was also discussed prohibiting endorsement of products which conflict with The Citadel’s institutional values, but it was noted that such a rule would likely raise First Amendment concerns.

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Personally, I think there is a distinction to be made between general NIL rights and a school-sponsored “collective”, which should be a non-starter at The Citadel.

It is one thing for cadets to work with local businesses, learning the value of networking, etc., or engaging in activities such as sports camps or individual instruction. I have no problem with that; nobody should. It would be like someone in the regimental band teaching local students how to play the bagpipes or the trumpet (and being compensated for it).

A school-sponsored collective implies pay-for-play, however, and that is not the route The Citadel needs to take going forward. Doing so would fly in the face of the school’s overall mission.

It won’t be the route most of The Citadel’s peers will take, either, and that matters in the long run when schools form alliances (or new conferences) as a reaction to the “modernization” of college athletics.

I know there are currently schools in the SoCon that are banking on collectives, and pay-for-play. In the short term, they’re going to have an advantage over The Citadel in certain sports (particularly basketball). That isn’t really something which is controllable.

In ten years, there is a decent chance that The Citadel is not in the same conference with a school like, say, East Tennessee State. That won’t matter, though, if The Citadel is still aligned with VMI and Furman and other schools which could be construed as having a similar reputation (a hard-to-define combination of history, prestige, and cachet).

And yes, I realize that some of those “similar reputation” institutions are currently putting a lot of money into certain sports (like hoops). I’m thinking about what the outlook will be in 10-to-20 years, not 3-to-5.

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Now about the transfer portal and non-cadet athletes:

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First, I sincerely hope that coaches are not under any pressure to bring in non-cadets rather than freshmen in order to save money. I would consider any attempt to implement such a policy to be worthy of dismissal.

As to expenses for living in Charleston, I think the problem there is partly with the SoCon. In an appearance on an ETSU-affiliated podcast last December, East Tennessee State AD Richard Sander said this:

“The SoCon is the only conference in the country that limits cost of attendance. So we can only provide 28 student-athletes cost of attendance…we’re limited as to the [league’s] cap…that’s $2000.00. Well, our [actual] cost of attendance at ETSU is $6900.00.

We [ETSU], Chattanooga, a couple of other places [want to change that], but I’ll be honest, the private schools don’t want to change that. They think it’s a competitive advantage for us because our cost of attendance is high compared to theirs.

When we’re recruiting against, pick somebody in basketball…Western Kentucky or College of Charleston, they’re giving [players] total cost of attendance and we think in that kind of situation we think [the league rules] are creating a real difficult situation for us.”

It is possible the SoCon’s CoA rule might be working against The Citadel. I could be wrong about this interpretation, to be sure, but I don’t think the military college is one of the schools blocking a potential increase in the limit.

Briggs is absolutely correct about trying to live in Charleston on $950 per month, and that certainly has had a deleterious effect on the recruitment of certain athletes. We’ve all heard the stories.

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Having said that, I am one of the alums who would greatly prefer that almost all (if not all) of our athletes are in the corps of cadets, or are recent graduates from the corps. There are arguments on both sides about this, of course, but I come back to a couple of things.

– “I’m sure most of the alumni would prefer to have all cadets on our teams, but they also want to win.” — Gen. Walters

Well, yes, but when is the last time a transfer-heavy squad at The Citadel was legitimately successful? I’ll wait on your answer. It will be a long wait.

The fact is that we have allowed our coaches to supplement their rosters with large numbers of transfers in recent years, and in no situation has it resulted in a significant increase in winning. Sometimes, it seems to have boomeranged in the opposite direction.

Also, while I understand the point about the problem of cycling through rosters due to freshman attrition, that has always been an issue at The Citadel, long before the transfer portal existed. I might add that the constant one-year “rental” of graduate students hasn’t done anything for continuity (or general competitiveness) either.

– There is another rationale involved here. For whom do the varsity teams at The Citadel primarily exist as a benefit? Well, the players themselves, obviously.

They also exist for the alumni and other supporters, including those in the local community. And they exist, most importantly, for the corps of cadets. I think it is natural and right for the corps to be able to cheer for a team that consists mostly (if not entirely) of fellow cadets.

This isn’t just about a pie-in-the-sky notion of utopia, either. There is also a financial consideration, after all. As Miller pointed out in his article:

Each cadet pays around $3,000 a year in student athletic fees, among the highest in the country. That comes out to approximately $6.4 million, the largest source of revenue for the athletic department.

If cadets are going to front the plurality of the funds which support varsity athletics, it seems to me that those teams should represent them in something close to totality. That means the players should mostly be cadets, too.

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I wish Andrew Miller had quoted an alumnus with a strong opinion about the issue at hand. I would have liked him to interview one of those who had “bristled”. I think that would have been appropriate, and would have also avoided Walters’ comment coming off as a bit of a ‘strawman’ construct (which clearly wasn’t the intent).

Walters’ quote interested me, though, because I could not recall graduate students playing football in the 1975-78 time frame when he was at The Citadel (he’s a 1979 grad). I’m not old enough to know for sure, though, so I will defer to Walters on this.

To be fair, Walters didn’t specifically refer to grad students in football, but rather he just made a comment about “guys with hair flowing out of the backs of their helmets”.

From perusing the 1978 football media guide, which featured the team that played during Walters’ senior year, I can see how that might have occasionally been the case. Kenny Caldwell is on the cover with Art Baker, and Caldwell’s hair is a little longer than what you would see today at The Citadel.

It was a 1970s thing, I guess. The photos of the coaching staff are instructive as well; offensive coordinator Rick Gilstrap had a lot of lettuce, and running backs coach Mike O’Cain sported a world-class moustache.

However, I don’t think the hairstyles of the 1970s, groovy as they might have been, are really applicable to today. I expect varsity athletes to conform to the current standards of the corps, regardless of status.

That means relatively short hair and no beards or moustaches. The Citadel is a military college. The players that represent it (and the corps of cadets) need to look like they belong, whether on the field, court, track, road, mat, course, range, or diamond.

Also, while a lot of the issues mentioned in the article are hard problems to solve, this isn’t one of them. Just tell the guys to get a shave and a haircut. The world won’t end, and it won’t cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.

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Texas A&M model

Oh, boy…

As well it should have. However, there is (unfortunately) more:

Up until 1964, Texas A&M required all students to be members in the Corps of Cadets. That year, school president James Earl Rudder opened up the school to women and Blacks for the first time. A year later, membership in the corps became voluntary.

Today, Texas A&M is the second-largest university in the nation with more than 72,000 students. Of those, 2,500 —including 300 women — are cadets.

The idea of allowing non-cadets into The Citadel isn’t even that new. Red Parker, the Bulldogs head coach from 1966-72, was a proponent of letting in non-cadets.

“You have to remember this was in the middle of the Vietnam war and the military wasn’t that popular back then,” said [Charlie Baker], who played linebacker for Parker in the early 1970s. “People think we’d lose our identity as a military school, but we wouldn’t. Look at what Texas A&M has done. They still have a Corps of Cadets, and the school is doing great.”

Texas A&M last year had a $17.2 billion endowment.

I’ll get to the most disingenuous sentence in that quote in a few paragraphs.

However, first let me say this. I have great respect for both Ellis Johnson (who played at The Citadel and also served as its head football coach) and Charlie Baker (another former player who has done great things for The Citadel, and who bleeds light blue).

And they’re both incredibly wrong about this.

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Why do people think The Citadel would lose its identity as a military college? Well, because it would.

Do most people today think of Texas A&M as a military school? Of course not. The only time that even comes up in general discourse is when sports fans at other schools make fun of the Yell Leaders.

The Citadel, on the other hand, is chiefly identified as a military college. If you marginalize that essential component, it ceases to be The Citadel, both in the minds of the overwhelming majority of its alumni and among the public at large. It becomes Palmetto A&M, an entity with no history and no justification for having one.

It could be argued the best thing the State of South Carolina has going for it from a higher education standpoint is that (despite the best efforts of some of its leaders over the years) it has produced among its colleges and universities a unique, undeniably successful institution on the banks of the Ashley.

The Citadel has incredible value in its current form. It might be better positioned for the new era of university education than 95% of its fellow schools in this country — and that might be an underestimation.

Colleges and universities are desperately trying to differentiate themselves in order to attract a limited number of future students. It is not an easy thing to do.

However, that isn’t a problem for The Citadel. You can’t get the experience of being a cadet in an online format. You have to be there. You have to feel the no-see-ums. You have to accept a difficult challenge and ultimately pass a test of will, and you have to pass that test in the presence (and with the assistance) of others.

Not only am I diametrically opposed to reducing The Citadel’s value as an alumnus, but I also resent the suggestion as a citizen of the state. Why diminish something so beneficial for no real advantage (and a lot of obvious pitfalls)?

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Ellis Johnson also said this:

“Seventy percent of Citadel graduates don’t go into the military,” Johnson said. “They go start businesses, they become entrepreneurs, they go into politics, and they are good, productive citizens. What’s wrong with producing good people and good citizens? Sometimes I think the school caters to that 30 percent of the alumni base a little too much.”

I didn’t understand this comment, on two levels. First, I don’t really think the school caters to its veteran alums more than its other graduates. I’ve never noticed that myself.

More to the point, though, is the idea that the veteran alums are those most against the gradual dissipation of the corps of cadets as the school’s focus. I don’t think that is true at all.

I haven’t done a survey or anything, but I know plenty of non-veterans who are dead-set against turning the school into Palmetto A&M. I’m one of them.

I’m not even sure that a higher percentage of veterans than non-vets are against that concept. I would suspect that there is uniformity in the opposition, regardless of background.

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This might be a digression, but I think it is a necessary one. The line in the article that I found particularly misleading was this one:

Texas A&M last year had a $17.2 billion endowment.

In the context of the story, that brief statement tends to imply that Texas A&M began admitting non-cadets and things have gone fantastically well ever since, including an amazing endowment which surely is directly related to the school’s change of mission.

The truth is that there cannot possibly be anything more unrelated than Texas A&M’s endowment and the status of its Corps of Cadets. It might be the most unrelated thing in the history of unrelatedness.

The actual reason Texas A&M has a large endowment is a 19th-century provision established in the Texas Constitution that created something known as the Permanent University Fund (PUF):

In 1876, the Texas Constitution set aside land in West Texas to support The University of Texas and Texas A&M systems of higher education. Today, that land – encompassing 2.1 million acres – is leased to oil and gas companies whose wells generate revenue that flows into the PUF. Land also is leased for grazing, wind farms and other revenue-generating activities.

The Texas A&M system receives one-third of the annual proceeds of the PUF, while the University of Texas system gets the other two-thirds (and thus UT’s endowment is even more monstrous than TAMU’s).

Texas A&M’s share of the PUF return in 2023 totaled slightly over $410 million. That’s for one year. It will get more money this year, and even more cash next year, and presumably every year after that as long as the wells don’t completely run dry.

The provision that set up TAMU (and UT) for all that moolah was enacted 88 years before the school began admitting non-cadets.

The reference to Texas A&M’s endowment should not have been in the article.

The Citadel doesn’t need to be like Texas A&M, and it couldn’t be like Texas A&M even if everyone wanted that outcome. And most people don’t anyway.

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Earlier this week, there was another piece in The Post and Courier about The Citadel’s future in athletics, this one in the form of a column by Scott Hamilton that was centered around the upcoming search for a new director of athletics. I wanted to highlight one part of it:

Some initial thoughts are if The Citadel might consider moving down a level. Should dropping to Division II – or perhaps even Division III – be on the table?

“No, they just need to know exactly who they are and what their mission is,” said Rob Yowell, president of Arizona-based Gemini Sports. “And that’s (to be) more like West Point, Annapolis and Air Force. Not Coastal Carolina, Liberty and Louisiana-Monroe.”

Yowell, whose firm runs major events such as the PGA Tour’s Waste Management Phoenix Open and the Fiesta Bowl, is spot-on. Having an identity would simplify things so much. The service academies embrace who they are, just as traditional Group of 5 schools realize they’re not competing on and off the field with the likes of Alabama and Ohio State.

It is nice to read something as perceptive as that from an outsider — in this case, a Duke graduate who lives in Phoenix. Wonders will never cease.

I will say that The Citadel does share some things in common with Coastal Carolina and ULM, so it isn’t an “exact opposite” comparison when it comes to those two schools (and coincidentally, the AD at Louisiana-Monroe is John Hartwell, a graduate of The Citadel).

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“There are a lot of older alumni that believe this place was some kind of nirvana back in the day, and it’s just not true,” Walters said.

Walters is 100% correct about that. I can sympathize with him as he tries to navigate the school through a lot of choppy water, trying to justify various decisions to alumni, a few of whom think it is still 1950, or who wish it were still 1950.

In terms of sports, this is a very trying time for the military college. I believe that the current climate in college athletics is the worst it could be from The Citadel’s perspective since the Sanity Code was enacted in 1948.

Of course, we all know what happened then. The Citadel became one of the famed “Sinful Seven”, and the Sanity Code was eventually revoked.

It didn’t come without controversy, however. For one thing, an attempt was made to expel those seven schools from the NCAA in 1950 — not put them in probation, mind you (probation as we know it today didn’t exist) — but throw them out of the association entirely.

And more than half of the schools in the NCAA voted to expel The Citadel, and the other six schools.

That’s right. Of the 203 delegates, 111 of them cast a ballot to toss out The Citadel and company. The president of the NCAA actually announced that the motion had passed — and then he was reminded that a two-thirds super-majority was needed, and that the motion had thus failed by 25 votes.

That failure essentially ended the long-term viability of the Sanity Code (though it wasn’t formally repealed until the following year).

I think about that occasionally. It is a reminder that things are always going to be a bit testy for The Citadel when it comes to its place in college sports. More than half of its fellow NCAA members once voted to throw the school out of the club.

It is also not strictly coincidental that The Citadel struggled mightily in varsity athletics in the years following the original enactment of the Sanity Code (there were admittedly other reasons too).

From 1948 through 1954, the Bulldogs’ football program had a record of 21-44-1, with no winning seasons in those seven years. In basketball it was even worse. From 1949 through 1956, the hoopsters were 28-135.

Does that sound vaguely familiar?

Things changed, though. The climate around college athletics eventually turned a bit (not too much) in The Citadel’s favor. By the late 1950s, backed by a new school president who didn’t like to lose, and playing in a conference with schools much more on its level than in the previous 20 years, The Citadel started winning consistently in almost all sports.

That can happen again. It will require patience, though. I just hope the folks running the institution (and the alumni and other supporters) maintain that patience.

I want to win, too. I just don’t want to throw away what makes The Citadel great in the process.

Filed under: Special Topics, The Citadel | Tagged: Andrew Miller, Art Baker, Board of Visitors, Charlie Baker, Coastal Carolina, East Tennessee State, Ellis Johnson, Furman, Glenn Walters, Heritage Act, Jack Douglas, John Hartwell, Johnson Hagood Stadium, Kenny Caldwell, Mike Capaccio, Mike O'Cain, Palmetto A&M, Rick Gilstrap, Rick Kelly, Rob Yowell, Robbie Briggs, Sanity Code, Scott Hamilton, Sinful Seven, SoCon, Texas, Texas A&M, The Citadel, The Post and Courier, ULM, VMI | 2 Comments »