CSUN ANALYSIS: ON THE ROPES BEFORE THE FALL FOOTBALL IN TURMOIL SINCE '93.

Byline: Lee Barnathan Staff Writer

The knockout punch came from the Big West Conference.

Staggering from blows delivered by an uncompromising gender-equity settlement, financial woes, NCAA rules violations and a subsequent investigation, as well as a leadership crisis, Cal State Northridge's football future hit the canvas when CSUN announced it was leaving the Big Sky Conference in February 2000.

The move made sense for the school and every other sports program. But it left football an orphan.

The Big West does not sanction football, leaving CSUN an independent program with few reasons for anyone to play it.

Yet that was only the latest punch. CSUN football has struggled from the moment it moved to Division I-AA in 1993.

Back in 1990, when then-president James Cleary announced CSUN was moving from Division II, administrators knew money would determine success or failure. Cleary estimated it would cost $2 million to fund athletics over the first three years and $20 million for the construction of new facilities. He envisioned a multipurpose sports complex that would house football, basketball, soccer, volleyball and baseball teams.

``It will be a challenge,'' then-tennis coach Terry Davila said.

And it was. CSUN ever since has staggered under the responsibility of paying for sports it cannot afford.

The athletic department regularly found itself in financial straits, and cutting football is the easiest path to financial health. The sport takes $1.3 million annually from a $7.8 million budget.

``We have,'' athletic director Dick Dull wrote Monday, ``been unable to support fully those teams.''

Further, the Cal State system's settlement with the California chapter of the National Organization for Women following Cal-NOW's lawsuit in the early 1990s alleging Title IX violations requires campuses to provide resources to reflect the gender makeup of the student body within 5 percent.

With women significantly outnumbering men at CSUN, the university has added a number of women's sports - water polo most recently this fall - and bulked up the finances of already existing women's sports.

However, the big expenses and large number of players and coaches it takes to field a football team put the athletic program in a hole in its gender-equity struggle, a hole from which it could never emerge. Especially a football team that drew less than 3,000 fans to home games.

In 1997, the school tried to ax four men's sports, including baseball, soccer and volleyball, in order to erase its budget and gender-equity shortfalls. Community outcry prevented that from happening, and the athletic department's entire administration was eventually forced out in what became a huge housecleaning.

Then-President Blenda Wilson, whose hands-off approach to athletics was widely criticized and contributed to her eventual ouster, epitomized the university's lackluster leadership.

She decided to build a new biotechnology center on the site of the football field before ever figuring out where the team would play in the future. Promises, community meetings and study were followed by inaction and excuses.

Today's CSUN administrators have focused more on basketball and other sports in which CSUN has been much more successful. The school, in fact, earned its first berth to the NCAA basketball tournament last March.

Finally, there were the scandals.

In 1996, then-coach Dave Baldwin was reprimanded and forced to apologize to the campus community for his role in covering up a player's shooting. His successor and former assistant, Ron Ponciano, was fired in the wake of an internal investigation in 1999 that found numerous NCAA and school violations.

Both men are widely considered to be excellent coaches who were put in positions to fail, yet the damage to the school's integrity was real.

And, in the end, it was all too much to overcome.