Monday, September 7, 2026

To Our Student Athletes, Coaches, Athletics Administrators, and Supporters of Edward Waters University Athletics | A. Zachary Faison, Jr., President & CEO of Edward Waters University

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A. Zachary Faison, Jr.     (FULL TEXT)

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.

(2) I simply no longer believe that. The terms are not acceptable to Edward Waters going forward.

Someone will raise the exceptions, and they deserve an honest answer. Albany State held Florida A&M to 20 to 7 last weekend. Kentucky State led Grambling State 14 to 0 and again with under eight minutes to play in 2025 before losing 37 to 31 in overtime. Clark Atlanta trailed Bethune-Cookman 34 to 14 at halftime in 2024 and won 38 to 37 on a 55 yard field goal as time expired. Those results are real, and I celebrate every one of them. But they are exceptions, and everyone in this business knows it.

Across the sport, these games end the way Saturday ended in Jackson, MS, and the way Athens, Georgia ended. A scheduling philosophy built on the hope of being the exception is not a philosophy. It is a wager placed with someone else's Saturday afternoon, someone else's film, and someone else's confidence. I am not willing to keep making that wager with our young men.

So let me be direct about the standard. My keys do not begin to rattle for anything that nets this institution less than $100,000 after travel and related costs. And netting $100,000 does not mean we play. It means we will listen. What we will not do is play a Division I opponent for less than 35 percent of the guarantee that institution itself receives for its own Power Four game. If a program is collecting $600,000 to absorb that treatment, it can pay a proportional share to ask the same of us. Below that, the conversation does not start.

The same philosophy applies in the other direction. We will not schedule NAIA institutions in football except in compellingly rare circumstances. When we win, we receive no credit toward NCAA Division II postseason eligibility. When we lose, we absorb a reputational cost we cannot recover. There is virtually no version of that game that advances this institution.

We will schedule where we belong and where we can win. The CIAA, the SIAC, Conference Carolinas, and the Gulf South Conference are all regionally proximal NCAA Division II conferences offering opponents commensurate with the level at which we compete. That is our competitive universe, and it is a strong one.

You work too hard for this. Our coaches work too hard for this. Our reputational standing will never be diminished by any failure of our players or our staff. Saturday it was arguably diminished by an administrative decision I made, and I am not going to keep making it.

I am grateful we came through without significant physical injury. I am equally mindful of the mental and psychological toll such a game takes on young men who prepared all week and gave everything they had. That kind of harm does not appear on an injury report, and it is precisely the harm I am no longer willing to risk for $30,000.

Everything is still in front of this team this season. I remain fully confident in this program, in its leadership, and in what you will accomplish this season. What is being built here is real, and nothing about Saturday changes that. My job is to make certain the schedule reflects the standard you have set rather than working against it.

Let's get ready for Miles! 💪🏿💪🏿💯💯🐅🐅

A. Zachary Faison, Jr., Ed.D., J.D.
President and Chief Executive Officer
Edward Waters University

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