Brown Football in Decline — In the Past 3+ Years, 5-28
GoLocalProv Sports Team
Brown Football in Decline — In the Past 3+ Years, 5-28
This record represents the final two years of Phil Estes and the first year-plus of coach James Perry.
Brown’s demise is an aberration. In the previous four seasons, the Bears were 20-20, and the prior four seasons to that, Brown was 26-14.
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The Wrong Direction
Nothing has been going right.
The Ivy League did not play last season due to the pandemic.
This season through the first three games, the Bears have been outscored 130 - 70, good for Brown giving up an average of 43 points a game while scoring 23.
In May of 2020, Brown decided to slash a number of varsity teams in order to shift resources to higher-profile sports.
"We envision varsity athletes who, as Brown students, are among the most academically talented in the world, who also compete on teams that are among the most competitive among our peers," Paxson said at the time of the cuts. "And we have a vision for club sports that offer competitive athletic opportunities to a wide array of students, while also supporting health and well-being. The Excellence in Brown Athletics Initiative is a bold plan to reshape athletics for our student-athletes and to achieve that vision."
After backlash, Brown restored some programs, offended a lot of alumni, and faced more court actions for gender inequities.
In 2020, GoLocal unveiled emails that showed an effort by top administrators at Brown University and powerful alumni strategizing on how to minimize the impact of the 1998 agreement which dictates participation in women’s sports.
The backdrop is a battle over cuts to Brown sports and compliance with a federal -- and now nearly two-decade-old consent decree -- on compliance with Title IX regarding women’s sports.
The emails show Samuel Mencoff, a billionaire co-founder of Madison Dearborn Partners, one of the country’s leading private equity firms in the United States, expressing his frustration over the consent decree.
"Kill the Pestilential Thing"
More than 100 pages of emails and documents released by the RI ACLU show frustration at the highest level of the university to comply with the requirements of the federal consent decree and functionally linking the requirement to support women’s sports as the cause of the poor performance for Brown’s athletics.
“But here’s an idea. Could we use this moment, where anger and frustration, especially from track and squash, are intense and building, to go after the Consent Decree once and for all?" wrote Mencoff in an email to Brown Christina Paxson.
Paxson and then-Brown Athletic Director Jack Hayes announced cuts to nearly a dozen Brown sports that year.
Mencoff, who serves as provost at Brown, went on, “Could we channel all this emotion away from anger at Brown to anger at the court and kill this pestilential thing. The argument would be that the Consent decree is forcing us [Brown] to eliminate these sports, and the court would be bombarded with emails and calls as we are now.”
Brown at the time stated: "Brown is not seeking to terminate the Cohen agreement at this time and certainly would never pit one team or group of alumni against each other. The fact is that the current legal action has absolutely nothing to do with whether the agreement has maintained its usefulness at all, after 22 years. This is a sideshow. The only issue at stake is whether Brown is in compliance with the agreement. Our athletics program was in compliance with the agreement before the initiative and remains so following the revisions to our roster of varsity teams."
After failed effort to cut sports, Paxson dismissed Hayes and brought in a new athletic director, M. Grace Calhoun.
In the end, Brown's high-profile sports continue to flounder, especially men's sports. Beyond Brown football, the once highly touted men's soccer team has sunk into the abyss. This year's team is 3-5. In 2019, the team was 4-9-4.
