At the annual convention of the National Association of Collegiate Directors of Athletics (NACDA), the Association's officers and executive committee issued a statement expressing strong philosophical concerns with the recent legislation that allows televising Friday night collegiate football games.

With the passage of this legislation, it is now up to each individual school and conference to make their own decisions concerning this issue. NACDA encourages all of its football-playing member institutions to consider the unintended consequences in scheduling Friday night football games and to refrain from embarking on this path.

As University of Maryland, College Park, Director of Athletics and NACDA Immediate Past President Deborah Yow said, "NACDA recognizes the financial issues facing a number of its member institutions, which can be partially alleviated by playing Friday night televised football games. However, it is the position of this organization's executive committee that these issues should not serve as the rationale for this fundamental change in the relationships with our high-school football programs across the country."

Collegiate football programs depend upon the success of football programs at the high-school level. Friday night football has long been a tradition in high school, where communities fill stadiums and bleachers in support of their young, local heroes. Gate receipts are key to the success of these programs, and the collegiate community must not interfere in this area. These programs develop the players who dominate fall Saturday afternoons for colleges' traditional day on the gridiron. We must ensure their continued success to continue the success in the collegiate arena.

As administrators reflect upon this issue, we must revisit our history lessons so as not to repeat the mistakes of the past. The first televised collegiate football game occurred in 1940, with the University of Pennsylvania playing Maryland. In the early years of televised football, there was concern that the televising of games would result in a decrease in

attendance, which, of course, happened. However, by 1960, college football attendance rebounded to the levels of the pre-television period.

The NFL, which had been playing its games on Sunday, in 1961 considered expanding its television coverage to include Saturday. NACDA President Jim Corbett, then athletics director at Louisiana State University and chair of the NCAA Television Committee, saw the possibility of professional football on Saturday as "a threat of dilution of the protection earned by the colleges of voluntary imposition of restricted television for more than a decade." However, colleges no longer needed to worry about the NFL voluntarily restricting itself from Saturday broadcasts as Congress enacted legislation prohibiting the televising of professional football on Saturdays during the college season.

Now it is time for the college community to learn the lessons of that history chapter. The collegiate community can be seen as the NFL and the high schools as the colleges of the 1960s. Where the NFL was ready to infringe on college football's traditional day, now the collegiate community is set to do the same thing to high schools. However, this time, there will not be any protective federal laws or NCAA regulations. It will be up to the collegiate communities to voluntarily restrict themselves from entering into Friday night television contracts.

This voluntary restriction is a course of action that is necessary for the long-term success of football at all levels -- high school, collegiate and professional. The collegiate community must not harm the grass-roots, high-school programs.

While televising Friday night games may help some institutions in the short term, in the long run, the television industry would need to start scheduling the big-name programs to be successful, thereby eliminating the schools that were looking to benefit from this revenue stream in the first place. Thus, it may be only a short-term solution for those programs.

The collegiate community must look beyond this as a solution to financial issues and find ways that will benefit collegiate football programs, both large and small. We must voluntarily restrict ourselves from televising Friday night football games.

Michael J. Cleary is the executive director of the National Association of Collegiate Directors of Athletics.