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TU Announces It's Dropping Men's Golf


Old Titan

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Stunning announcement from TU today that, effective July 1, it is dropping the men's golf program.

This effectively brings to an end the brilliant career of former ORU golf coach and Hall of Fame inductee Bill Brodgen, who's been at TU for 30 years and led ORU to within ONE STROKE of a national championship in the early '80's with Joe Rassett, Jim Kane, Bryan Norton, and Bill Glasson.

Conflicting reports as to why TU is making the move, but have to figure that with so many male athletes in football and soccer, there is a Title IX angle to this thing.  Still, golf only has SIX scholarship athletes - is having a full roster for women's soccer AND softball really that important to eliminate one of their most successful programs?

Another factor is the revenue issue:  golf makes no money, and football and basketball at TU don't generate enough income to support the non-revenue sports. The money for recruiting, coaching salaries, travel, etc has to come from somewhere for the non-revenues, and there's only so much to go around.

One thing is for sure:  news like this can't play well at 81st & Lewis either, if you're a non-revenue sport coach or athlete.

I mean, if endowment-rich TU is cutting back on athletic programs, how can that possibly be good news for money-strapped ORU?

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Cutting men's golf will save TU $525,000 per year (according to local sports radio).  I don't know if that number includes athletic scholarships or not.  

A decent chunk of those savings may go to pay athlete stipends.

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A great point that since it is only a partial scholarship, the golfers pay at least part of their own way, so the actual budget hit  to the university is less than other sports with full scholarships.  These are tough decisions and the AD comes off as the bad guy when it may actually be the university president forcing the issue.

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  • 1 month later...

Really nice story in the Tulsa World about Coach Brogden and 3 of our golf alumni--Rassett, Norton, Kane--going to spend time with him at his last tournament. Very classy!

http://www.tulsaworld.com/sportsextra/johnklein/john-klein-tu-coach-bill-brogden-takes-one-last-walk/article_a06b5c18-f6a7-576a-8a49-1b79835b0974.html

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