WKU hoping FBS football makes a splash on the Hill

[September 02, 2009]  BOWLING GREEN, Ky. (AP) -- Wood Selig thought the breakthrough, the moment when football would finally matter at Western Kentucky, would come after the Hilltoppers won the 2002 Division I-AA national championship.

The WKU athletic director had seen firsthand how success on the football field could transform the culture at a school. Selig was working at Virginia in 1990 when the Cavaliers made a surprising run to No. 1, sparking a pigskin craze on the normally hoops-mad campus.

"When you're No. 1, they want to write books about you, your licensing is just off the shelves and I'm thinking 'God, this is going to be just like that,'" Selig said.

It wasn't.

The windfall for winning it all? An extra 100 season tickets. No book deals. No major run on T-shirts, red towels or other WKU gear, not even on campus, where students often opted for shirts with "Kentucky" or "Louisville" splashed across the front.

"No matter how hard we tried, no matter what we did, moving the needle was going to be very, very difficult," Selig said.

Frustrated by the lack of a bounce after reaching unprecedented heights, Selig and university president Gary Ransdell sat down for a frank discussion about where the program was and where it needed to go.

"We asked ourselves 'What are we getting by playing at this level other than the gratification of having a competitive program?'" Ransdell said. "It was a pretty short list."

The decision turned out to be not much of one.

Knowing the NCAA was considering putting a moratorium on schools looking to move from the Football Championship Subdivision to the Football Bowl Subdivision, the Hilltoppers opted on taking a very expensive gamble that by stepping up to join the Sun Belt Conference, football would finally matter at WKU.

The move hasn't been easy, cheap or always fun.

Yet it was one the school felt it needed to make, one that Sun Belt commissioner Wright Waters -- who oversaw the Sun Belt's move into football -- said tends to have a palpable effect on the rest of the athletic department.

"Every single one of them will tell you that (FBS) brings a certain urgency with it that goes throughout your entire athletic department," Waters said. "It heightens people's senses regardless of the sport."

The Hilltoppers just beat the deadline before the NCAA put a temporary stop on schools moving up and have spent the last two years in purgatory during a mandated transition period that left them ineligible for postseason play and struggling for recognition.

The on-the-field growing pains have been obvious. WKU went 9-15 during the transitional period, including an 0-10 record against FBS teams in 2008 while playing a schedule that included games at Alabama, Virginia Tech and Kentucky.

Coach Dave Elson said the problem isn't necessarily talent, but depth. The Hilltoppers have redshirted the overwhelming majority of their freshmen the last two years, meaning the players on the field were the ones who committed to WKU when it was an FCS school.

Now, with 85 scholarships and a recruiting budget that's doubled in size the last four years at his disposal, Elson is finding himself in all kinds of interesting places.

Like, say, Texas.

Elson had never made a single recruiting trip to one of the nation's most fertile recruiting grounds until last spring, when he ventured to the Dallas area to sign wide receiver Will Adams and safety Denton Allmon.

He was there all of five minutes when he was on the phone.

"I called the recruiting coordinator (Mike Chism) and said we're going to add another coach to this area," Elson said. "This is big-time football."

And WKU doesn't consider itself so small-time anymore.

Not after Houchens Industries-L.T. Smith Stadium underwent a $49.5 million facelift, the majority of which was approved through bonds.

Elson and Selig both target 2012 as the season when the program will finally be on equal footing with opponents in terms of depth. For now, they'll simply settle for being competitive in the Sun Belt.

"It's going to be 3-4 years before we're playing with fifth-year seniors, that's when it's going to be fair to assess our program," Selig said. "We're just concerned with doing it the right way. It's a process you can't microwave."

[Associated Press; By WILL GRAVES]

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