Edward Hershey

Hershey, author of 2018 Oregon Book Award finalist “The Scorekeeper,” lives in Southeast Portland.

With another college football season coming to a close, is it time to ask anew why Portland State is even still in the game?

This is not meant to belittle the team’s 12 coaches and 90 players who rose above multiple roadblocks to achieve literal mediocrity this season. The Vikings finished in a three-way tie for sixth place in the 13-team Big Sky Conference. It even came within a touchdown of Arkansas in one of those annual mismatches the Vikings must play for gate receipts to help balance the team’s $3.37 million price tag.

That might not seem a lot – it’s a tad less than 1% of PSU’s overall expenditure – but given how few people on campus or in town seem to care, why bother? Sad to say, football at PSU has become a wasteful conceit, by far the largest item in an athletics budget that eats up nearly a quarter of the $17 million in undergraduate fees allocated by a student committee.

Given how few students have ever attended a game it is small wonder that one student, who is now a member of the student committee, questioned this expenditure at a forum in April. According to the PSU Vanguard, Gabriel Hagemann contended that administrators are unrealistic in viewing PSU “like it’s a standard university as far as athletics.” Student Sirra Anderson defended the allocation. “The athletics department has really upped their game,” she said, “and they’ve been really trying to make it more appealing for students to come out and go to the games, which I think would build a lot of cohesiveness within our university.”

Alas, this latest promotional effort (as others before it) has fallen flat. Attendance was scant enough when the Vikings called Providence Park home. Now that they play on a field in Hillsboro it is downright embarrassing. Six home games attracted an average of 4,000 and if you subtract the game with Montana, which brought half the crowd, it dips to barely 3,500 — respectable, perhaps, for a high school varsity.

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No, the Big Sky conference is not the Big 10, but Montana did average 23,544 for its six scheduled home games. And before you suggest there might not be much else to do on Saturdays in Missoula, Portland State’s logical apples-to-apples comparator, Sacramento State, just about tripled the Vikings, drawing a shade under 12,000 a game.

Please don’t get me wrong. I’ve always been a fan of Portland State the university even if its trustees seem to have a hard time picking presidents and fundraising lags well behind its sister universities in Eugene and Corvallis. The place is a font of opportunity for students of all ages and its urban campus a welcome island of diversity.

But I keep wondering why Portland State the football team exists. With all the academic cutbacks amid perpetual budget squeezes as well as well-documented financial challenges facing PSU students in an era of ever-rising tuition, how can anyone justify pouring so much time and money into an activity that involves so few?

Plus, there are other varsity sports that male undergrads cannot play so the university can adhere to the worthy dictates of Title IX of the federal Education Amendments of 1972, the groundbreaking legislation that paved the way for gender equity in intercollegiate athletics. With football eating up so much of the athletic budget, PSU fields just four other male teams compared to eight female teams, including soccer, softball, volleyball, tennis and golf. Even so, according to its latest government filing, PSU expends 55% of its athletics budget on men who comprise 45.5% of its undergraduate student body.

Portland State should follow the lead of Boston University, Hofstra, Northeastern, Jacksonville and other institutions enjoying life after football.