Pecyna: Grambling State’s best option is to shut down football program

I wanted to scour Grambling State’s football roster because I was yearning to put some faces to the turmoil that has unfolded in the past week.

After searching “Grambling State football roster,” I was met with boldface letters at the top of a blank page: not found.

OK, what about the schedule? Not found.

Any luck on the homepage, GSUTigers.com? Not found — or more technically, “HTTP Error 404. The requested resource is not found.”

Which turns out to be exactly what I was searching for in my quest to humanize Grambling’s football program. There is no face of the program right now, and the resources the players requested have long turned up blank. The dire situation has affected not only Grambling’s football team, but also the university’s other institutions and some of its competitors, which begs the question: Should the program continue to operate despite its seemingly unprecedented instability? 

On Oct. 15, the university’s football players walked out of a meeting with administrators, then refused to practice the next two games before ultimately neglecting to show up for the bus headed to Jackson State for the Oct. 19 game.

But the players weren’t truant, and they expressed their innocence and disdain in a letter to administrators obtained by ESPN.

In their expostulation, players gripe over the athletic complex’s mold and mildew infestation, which “can be seen on the ceiling, walls and floor and [is] contributing to water leaks because of faltering walls and ceilings.”

Then, the letter details hazardous flooring in the team’s gym; funding Gatorade or Muscle Milk out of pocket; despicable field and uniform maintenance, the latter resulting in moldy or mildew-speckled uniforms that have led to multiple staph infections; 14- and 17-hour bus rides to away games while “the president and athletic director traveled by plane”; and an lack of preparation in replacing Doug Williams, who was fired from his head coach position Sept. 9.

The team is 0-8 this season, but Grambling State — a historically black university in Louisiana — once thrived as a powerhouse under a college football Hall of Famer, head coach Eddie Robinson.

Robinson, the second winningest coach in the history of Division I football, coached from 1941 to 1997, winning 408 games, posting 45 winning seasons and capturing or sharing 17 Southwest Athletic Conference titles — all of which he achieved from Grambling’s sideline. Perhaps most telling of his masterful mentoring, Robinson also sent more than 200 players to professional football leagues — the AFL, CFL and NFL.

The current football program at Grambling is in no position to prepare its athletes for the next level. Just two players in the NFL hail from Grambling State: Jason Hatcher and Larry Donnell. The latter, who was drafted in 2012, is the first former Tiger to enter the league since 2007.

The players announced Monday that they agreed to end their boycott and return to practice after Williams, a former Grambling State star quarterback, and other greats encouraged them to play and set them up with Jim Bernhard, founder and 1968 chairman of the Baton Rouge-based Shaw Group.

Bernhard told players — according to Naquan Smith, the senior player who probably would prefer to take the field as a defensive back rather than field questions as team spokesman — that he would ensure facility updates so long as they returned to practice and finished the season. CytoSport, the maker of Muscle Milk, also donated 384 cases to the school, according to a tweet by the company.

Finishing the season is fine, so long as the players choose to do so. The future of the program should not be determined as easily.

It’s safe to assume that the school is responsible for temporarily disabling the team’s website — if that’s in fact what happened — but now it’s time for the administration to further the shutdown by disbanding its football program until it is in a position to offer more help than harm in a sport already rash with concussions and debilitating injuries.

Without specific figures from Bernhard’s assurance that the facility will receive the necessary maintenance consider the school’s financial duress, even outside of the athletic department.

University spokesman Will Sutton told ESPN that the school has encountered a “57 percent cut in state funding, which has occurred over the past several years” and that the cut has affected the whole campus and depleted the athletic department’s budget by $335,000 from its overall total of $6.8 million.

Sutton added that football’s budget was slashed in an increment of $75,000 to about $2 million.

Is that budget likely to increase in the next year? Continue decreasing? Stay the same?

The school’s dereliction for player resources has spilled over onto entities outside the football team.

Grambling State’s student newspaper, The Gramblinite, experienced its own backlash. David Lankster, the paper’s online editor, was fired, and Kimberly Monroe, the opinions editor, was suspended for two weeks.

Deadspin wrote, “Lankster said he was fired for tweeting statements from anonymous players and photos of the athletic facility from the newspaper’s Twitter account.”

AllDigitocracy also reported that The Gramblinite’s adviser “asked [Monroe] what role she played at the rally. Monroe responded that she was there as a concerned student. ‘That’s when [the adviser] told me that she didn’t know what she would do with me, but something would have to be done,’ Monroe said.”

The issue extends outside Grambling, too.

Grambling forfeited to Jackson State on Saturday, a date originally slated to be Jackson’s homecoming game, which left 11,249 ticket holders confused and deprived of football. USA Today reported that the absence of a contest cost the school about $200,000 in ticket sales alone.

According to Southwestern Athletic Conference rules, Grambling could face a $20,000 fine for the forfeit.

Jackson State spokesman Eric Stringfellow told USA Today, “We took a big hit from this.”

They weren’t the only ones who did, so perhaps it’s time to temporarily cut the football program at Grambling. There’s no telling what impact further insubordination of the program could spew on other schools.