One of UAB's biggest athletic boosters believes the decision to shut down the football program has already been made. It will be killed, he says, and an announcement could come as early as today.

Jimmy Filler, founder of the UAB Football Foundation, is particularly frustrated because he says he can raise as much as $5 million this year for the program, but no one seems to want it.

"Guess how many times the administration has reached out to me since I announced the foundation? Zero," Filler told AL.com on Monday. "They never called me, they never asked me. It's a done deal. They don't want me to raise money."

UAB head coach Bill Clark told AL.com on Sunday that he was still fighting for the program's future and "waiting for somebody to tell me what's going on." Another source within the athletic department who asked not to be named believes the decision to disband the football program was made months ago.

The program has been in a public state of upheaval since a group of boosters came forward with concerns that UAB president Ray Watts and the University of Alabama System Board of Trustees could shutter the program in the near future. The group pointed to giving head coach Bill Clark only a three-year contract, which is not the norm at the Division I level, and the lack of any scheduled opponents beyond 2016 as cause for concern. The school itself hasn't said much beyond that it commissioned CarrSports Consulting to conduct a study about the athletic department as part of a university planning initiative and that the report should be available shortly after the conclusion of UAB's season on Nov. 29.

Filler doesn't believe the study will have any impact on whether the program folds or not. Instead, he says, its fate was sealed as far back as 1991 when former UAB coach and athletic director Gene Bartow advised the NCAA to investigate Alabama's basketball program. In the letter to the NCAA, published by The Los Angeles Times in 1993, Bartow wrote that several former Alabama football coaches had been penalized by the NCAA and that they were "trained" by legendary Alabama coach Bear Bryant.

Filler believes Paul Bryant Jr., the son of Bear Bryant and a member of the Board of Trustees, has been trying to kill UAB's program for years as a "vendetta" for Bartow's letter. Filler has battled Bryant Jr. and the rest of the board for years to try to get UAB a new football stadium with little success.

"Coach Bartow was a dear, close friend of mine. He said this (would) happen," Filler said. "He said it two weeks before he passed that they wanted to kill UAB athletics. My good friend and dear man was 100 percent right."

Bartow passed away in 2012. Bryant Jr., a big booster for the University of Alabama, has never publicly commented about the letter.

The founder of the UAB Football Foundation hates that the program could see its untimely death soon, but is most upset about the impact it's having on the coaches, student-athletes and others associated with the Blazers football team. They are in a state of limbo as they wait to see what the school announces about the program's long-term future. Coaches and players could be forced to find new schools less than a week after UAB became bowl eligible for just the fourth time in program history. Committed recruits, some of which could enroll at UAB as early as next month, would quickly need to evaluate other options.

The disbanding of the football program could also have negative long-term ramifications on school donations, applications and enrollment. Multiple studies have shown a tangible connection between a successful football program and increased school applications. The University of Alabama has been one of the most notable recent examples, seeing an 147 percent increase in out-of-state applications from when Nick Saban arrived in 2006 to the most recent data available for 2013-14, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.

"Without college athletics, they are hurting undergrad recruiting," Filler said. "If South Alabama adopts football, if Old Dominion adopts football and UAB is doing the opposite - what does that tell you? They don't want to attract good undergraduate students."