In a time of slashed budgets for every university program, ISU athletics director Bruce Van De Velde and football coach Dan McCarney still felt they needed to turn down a lucrative offer to play a football game on a Friday night.

The game, which would have been played on Sept. 26 in DeKalb, Ill. against the Northern Illinois Huskies, would have been nationally televised on ESPN2, and Iowa State would have received $400,000 in television revenue.

For a university that needs as much positive exposure as we can get these days (no thanks to the athletics department), the decision to turn this opportunity, not to mention the money, down was foolish indeed.

The reason most cited for the game’s downfall is that Friday night is traditionally reserved for high school football. “In the end, it came down to Bruce’s and my own respect for prep football in the state of Iowa and Illinois and those coaches and not wanting to do anything to hurt their game,” Coach McCarney said in a June 20 Des Moines Register article.

Van de Velde said in a press release on the Iowa State Cyclones Web site, www.cyclones.com, “Ultimately, this [decision] was about respect for Iowa high school student-athletes, their coaches and communities.”

The game is going to be an away game regardless of what day it is played on, which significantly reduces the fan base they will take with them. Most of the college students who go to games will just stay home and drink instead of driving all that way to do the same thing.

And in all honesty, how much of a hardcore fan base is shared between local high school football and the Cyclones that there would be a significant amount of people who would miss a local game to watch a college game on television? After all, you can tape a televised game and watch it later, and that should occur to anyone who would actually be torn over which game to watch.

If it were on the same night as a local high school homecoming game, the decision over which game to watch should become even easier — support your high school.

Many attendees of high school football games are high schoolers and the football players’ girlfriends and parents, anyway. Everyone who is at the game is there to socialize, and at least half of the audience probably has no idea what the score is.

Is this really something to throw away possible exposure and income over?

It would be one thing if the Cyclone game was to be played at home — however, televising a Cyclone away game on a Friday night would have quite a minimal impact on local high school football attendance. It’s a shame that Iowa State now has to miss out on a great opportunity because of this decision.

Editorial Board: Nicole Paseka, Amy Schierbrock, Alicia Ebaugh, Ayrel Clark, Lucas Grundmeier