CSUN VILLAIN HARD TO FINGER.

Byline: STEVE DILBECK

You want a villain. A face for the dartboard, someone to blame, to cry out against.

They're killing football at Cal State Northridge. Putting a knife to the program, leaving it a disfigured memory on the side of the road. This is what bad guys do.

Then there is CSUN football coach Jeff Kearin, as good a guy as you'd ever hope to meet. Each earnest plea on behalf of his program made to every council, commission and administrator was sincere and true.

It's a sad day on the Northridge campus, a sad day for the area.

Maybe you want to cry out against Dick Dull, the CSUN athletic director who recommended to university president Jolene Koester that the program be cut.

You try to picture a cold-hearted accountant, another corporate bean counter sent to downsize and eliminate and destroy. You wonder how Dull would look fitted in all black. Only Dull was only being practical. He was very much doing the logical thing, the obvious thing.

He takes no joy in eliminating football. Dull wants to build, not tear down. He looked at the numbers and came to the only conclusion he could.

``I was asked to provide a recommendation, and I did from a professional standpoint,'' Dull said. ``I don't feel like I'm the guy in the black hat.

``I don't relish my position, but very often you don't have control over the circumstances in which you find yourself. I had to put the recommendation in the context of what I found here, and that is, too many sports and not enough money. It's regretful but, I think, the logical conclusion.''

This is not about sentiment. It's a rational decision. It's about coming to the best conclusion given the circumstances.

CSUN football was this odd little story, this dingy, lost dog of a program who'd look at you with those big, sad eyes and you couldn't help but feel a heart tug.

The Matadors played at an old racetrack, hidden away in a biotech park, a relic being overwhelmed by neo-architecture. The team locker rooms were converted stables, their coaches used trailers for offices. And this was the last year even for the funky old Devonshire Downs stadium. Next year they were being forced to play at Pierce JC. They'd have no stadium, no practice field, no offices.

They'd already been left without a conference, an independent struggling to put together a schedule. This year the Matadors had only two home games.

And, really, few around here cared. Not enough, anyway. Not enough to justify the continued expense of a $1.2 million program within a department staring at a projected $725,000 deficit this year and one expected to climb.

``When I took all of that into consideration, I regretfully came to the conclusion that if the rest of our 20 sports were going to survive and not have a budget balanced upon their back, I was going to have to make this recommendation,'' Dull said. ``There's been no fun in it, I can assure you.''

Dull said if he had kept football, with its unusual number of athletes, he would have had to add two more women's sports to meet gender-equity guidelines. Title IX makes an easy villain but is tough to put on the dart board.

It's the way of the world today, a struggle for most Division I-AA football programs. Not quite good enough to play at the top level and generate TV income but not operating a nonscholarship program that costs so much less.

If you're a Division I-AA school in other sports, the NCAA won't allow you to drop to Division II or III in football. ``I think that's a mistake on behalf of the NCAA, but I don't believe it's going to change,'' Dull said.

So there went the program, like Cal State Fullerton's and Cal State Long Beach's before it. ``I think anyone that's playing Division I-AA football has a hard road ahead of them,'' Dull said.

Kearin has rightly lamented there is no place in Southern California for the football player who is a notch below playing for UCLA or USC but far superior to the Division III area colleges.

That's true, too, but if CSUN had kept football, then it would have impacted the number of scholarships available in the rest of its sports.

``Everyone is talking about the opportunities we're denying the football players,'' Dull said. ``How about if I balance the budget off the other 20 sports. No one wants to look at the fact that I'm then denying opportunities to young women and young men in 20 other sports.''

There was no easy answer, just the practical one. Dull likens it to a family having to make its own financial priorities, putting off that new car to put Suzy through college.

You feel for Kearin, the coaches, the players and everyone who put so much into this program. They were good guys, not done in by the villain but by a system that left numbers, that left no choice.