Eric B. Lewis

To Our Student Athletes, Coaches, Athletics Administrators, and Supporters of Edward Waters University Athletics: First, to the young men who took the field Saturday afternoon at Jackson State: I am proud of you. You fought. You did not quit. Down after down, in a setting built to overwhelm a visiting team, you kept competing. That resolve reflects what our coaches and athletics leadership have built here, and I saw it clearly. It was not the outcome we wanted. Congratulations to Coach T.C. Taylor and the Jackson State program, who were the better team on Saturday and who have built something their university and their community should be proud of. We also know we can play much better, and that is ours to correct together. That said, and secondly, I owe you an apology, because the position we placed you in Saturday was not your doing and it was not your coaches'. That game went on our schedule two years ago and I enthusiastically supported it. The decision was mine, and I own it. Going forward, Edward Waters University will not schedule Division I opposition in football except on terms this institution sets and that materially and substantially advance our program goals. I want you and our supporters to understand exactly why. The economics do not work. We were paid a $65,000 guarantee, which covered none of our costs. Travel and related expenses ran roughly $30,000 to $35,000, so we cleared about $30,000. That does not begin to justify what such a game asks of a team, a coaching staff, and a program. The competitive terms are not commensurate ones. When we put 29 funded scholarships on the field against an FCS limit of 63, we are not being measured. We are being mismeasured. NCAA Division II caps us at 36. Our opponents are permitted nearly twice that before the first recruit signs. That figure of 29 also places us in the top quarter of the SIAC, and as a private institution the total dollar investment behind each of our equivalencies exceeds what even many of our public conference peers commit to the same count. We are not underinvesting in this program. We were competing against a structure, not simply a team. That result then follows our coaches into living rooms during recruiting season, where a young man decides he would rather sit on a bench at a Division I institution than compete and start here, because he has been shown a scoreboard telling him one product is superior to the other. It is not superior. It is different. Superior and different are not synonyms, and I will not keep handing anyone evidence drawn from a comparison that was never commensurate to begin with. Consider what HBCU Division I programs collect when they accept the same treatment they ask us to accept. This season, per reported contracts: Florida A&M receives $740,000 at Miami; Morgan State receives $600,000 at Arizona State; Tennessee State received $600,000 at Georgia; Arkansas Pine Bluff receives $550,000 at Missouri; Howard receives roughly $1,000,000 across games at Indiana and Rutgers; Another HBCU program was paid $1,000,000 to play at Ohio State last season and lost 70 to 0. Taken together, HBCU football programs will take in close to $7,000,000 from these games in 2026. Tennessee State is the clearest illustration. That is a very capable FCS program which lost to this same Jackson State team by two points the week before, and it was beaten 63 to 3 by my alma mater, the University of Georgia, on Saturday. The result says nothing about Tennessee State. It says everything about what happens when a program plays division(s) above itself. The difference is that Tennessee State went home with $600,000 and can convert it into something materially significant for its program. That is a defensible trade. Ours was not. I want to be clear that no one dealt with us unfairly. JSU and our sister HBCU institutions negotiated what was right for their programs, and we accepted terms we believed at the time were right for ours.