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<p>That really didn’t play a role in the decision to drop the two sports. Wrestling was dead anyway; there weren’t enough students interested to even field a team. Wrestling is vanishing from the NCAA scene across the board.</p>
<p>The football decision was all about admissions slots. With fewer than 750 male students on campus, the school had to allocate 10% of its male admissions slots specifically to football players each year. With the demand for slots to achieve other institutional priorities (diversity, engineering, music, art, international, and so on and so forth) some of which require admitting “low stat” kids, there simply weren’t enough slots, especially “low stat” slots, to fill a football team. Just a few years earlier, the Dean and the President almost forfeited a game because they barely had enough healthy players on the football roster to field a team. The school was caught in no-man’s land. The athletic department was clear that, if the school wanted to field a football team, they had to divert even more slots to football recruiting. The school was unwilling to do that and decided the only practical solution was to discontinue football.</p>
<p>The Swarthmore culture issue had reared its head back in the 1980s, when the team was actually winning. A very successful football coach was let go because his team had become increasingly disengaged from the campus community – both socially and academically. But, that was not an issue when the decision to drop football was made in 2000.</p>