It seems that the University of North Carolina Wilmington has everything a college student could ask for: the beach, great academic programs such as nursing, film studies, creative writing, education, business, and it has a Costco nearby.

However, UNCW is missing something that 625 other universities have: a football team. Football is one of America’s greatest sports. The Super Bowl, football’s biggest game, holds the record as the most watched event in world history.

So why is UNCW missing this? It’s all about the dollar signs.

Joe Browning has been UNCW’s Senior Associate Athletic Director for 27 years, dealing with communications. He explains that there are many reasons why UNCW doesn’t have a football team, but the primary one is purely finances.

“If you survey everyone in our department, which is 90 employees, all of us would love to have football here,” Browning said. “It’s the most popular sport in America, which makes us feel worse about not having it at this school. To start up a football team the right way, it would probably cost about $50 million. There are a lot of things that people don’t see within the football costs.”

In order to break down the cost to create a football program, the university would have to deal with building a new stadium, practice facilities, supplying equipment, hiring a coaching staff and trainers. So the university will have to deal with all of those salaries and benefits. Equipment alone would cost $250 to $300 per person. There are also the travel expenses if the team wants to go play football at other stadiums during the season. Then there are scholarships. If the school comes in at the FCS level (Division 1AA), that’s supplying 63 scholarships to student athletes.

“Our main goal right now for the athletic department is to fully fund all of our sports here at UNCW,” Browning said. “Right now we can only fully fund men’s and women’s basketball. We would like to fully fund all of our sports before we can add in football.”

UNCW has 19 sports programs, but only three of them are fully funded (the third is baseball). In the CAA, UNCW has the lowest percentage of fully funded teams (16 percent) behind the University of Delaware and 50 percent of their sports programs are fully funded. UNCW also has the lowest athletic budget in the CAA at $10.5 million a year. The next lowest athletic budget in the CAA is Old Dominion University with an estimated $27 million per year and they have a football team. Another small school that just recently added a football team is UNC-Charlotte, but Browning brings up a point that also helps college programs acquire football teams.

“We don’t live in a big corporate area, like Charlotte, so we don’t have that many corporate sponsors to help fund a football program,” Browning said.

The city of Wilmington, NC has a population of roughly 108,300 people. The population of Charlotte, NC is roughly 751,087. Being seven times larger than Wilmington, Charlotte has seven times the revenue coming from corporate sponsors and other big businesses around the metropolitan area. For UNCW’s athletic program, most of their revenue comes from student fees.

“Our money is going to have to come from student fee increases, which I’m sure students don’t want to hear about,” Browning said.

UNCW has the lowest student population in the CAA. This is a problem, because that means the school has the disadvantage of less people to pay for their expenses. When breaking down the athletic budget, student fees make up 77 percent of the revenue sources. Last year, UNCW brought in $4,955,000 from just student fees alone. The next biggest source of revenue was ticket sales from sporting events and that made up $655,000. Basically, the students at UNCW would have to pay more money if they would want a football team.

Ethan Griffith, a sophomore at UNCW, said that he would be willing to pay more for his tuition just so UNCW could have a football team.

“I think having a football team will bring a lot to UNCW that we don’t have now,” Griffith said. “It will help us out in a lot of ways by giving us more notoriety.”

However, Michael Llabona, another sophomore at UNCW, said the opposite.

“I shouldn’t be paying extra money for the school to get a football team,” said Llabona. “All big public projects are paid by bonds which is why they are able to keep additions cheap for the short run. Football programs are very lucrative businesses and they usually pay for themselves in the long run.”

According to a recent poll taken on theseahawk.org, 56 percent of students who took the poll want a football team. However, the athletic department at UNCW has a lot more on their plate. According to UNCW Athletic Director Jimmy Bass, creating a football team is far from being a priority.

“Our priority in the immediate future is to expand our scholarship offerings, improve/expand practice and competition facilities, and increase annual operating budgets for all sports while retaining a very talented coaching staff,” Bass said.

Because of the current economic state, costs are rising for everything, so for every year that UNCW doesn’t create a football program, it will hurt their chances even more.

“There are a lot of positives to having a football program,” Browning said. “But there’s rising costs every day. You go one year without having a football team, your costs of getting one increases. It could cost $50 million right now, but it will probably be somewhere around $60 million in three years, so you’ve got to consider that as well.”

UNCW was founded in 1947, which technically makes it a “young” university. This also has an effect on UNCW’s revenue. Since it is a small and young school, there are not enough alumni to support the school.

“Being a young school is definitely a disadvantage, but it’s not the sole reason why we don’t have a football team,” Browning said. “We don’t have a big alumni base and so we’re not getting as much support as older and bigger schools have.”

Not only does UNCW want a football team, but they also want to have one that will actually compete with other schools.

“You also have to think about how competitive you want to make your team,” Browning said. “We don’t want to start a football program unless we know it’s going to be successful, so money plays a big part in that as well. Our fans don’t want to just see a team, they want to see a team competing.”

The point that Browning brings up will just add more costs to UNCW’s football program. Better coaches want more money and better athletes want more scholarships. So with all of this thrown into the mix, Jimmy Bass estimates that in order to make a fully funded, competitive football program, it would take an initial investment of $300 million. That number is pretty far from UNCW’s financial goals, but Browning is optimistic that UNCW students will get what they want some time in the future.

“I think eventually we will have a football team, maybe not in my lifetime,” Browning said. “I think it’s just a financial hump that this school has got to get over. If there’s enough support out there for it and people want to pay for it, it can get done.”