Stillman College Football is back, and it has a football coach. On Thursday, the college named Teddy Keaton its athletic director and head football coach, putting a Stillman graduate in charge of bringing Tiger football back for the 2027-28 academic year.

The hire, announced at a press conference aired on Urban Edge Network, is the first concrete step since Stillman announced in August that football would return. It is also a homecoming. Keaton graduated from Stillman in 2000, coached there as an assistant from 1999 to 2004, and led the program as head coach from 2011 to 2015, going 27-26 and winning a share of the SIAC West Division title in 2011.

“Coach Keaton’s return to Stillman brings together our history and our future,” said Stillman President Dr. Yolanda W. Page. “He knows this institution, he understands our students, and he has demonstrated throughout his career that he knows how to build programs.”

Building is the job. Stillman’s financial statements, enrollment data, and athletics reports show a small college with real strengths, and a department that will need to grow several times over to support a football team.

The Builder

Keaton’s résumé centers on starting and restoring programs. In 2018, he helped launch Allen University’s football program from scratch and led it through its move from the NAIA to NCAA Division II. He later took over a Clark Atlanta program coming off a 0-10 season and went 7-3-1 in his first year, reaching the SIAC Championship Game. He also served as Allen’s assistant athletic director for compliance. His career record as a college and professional head coach stands at 80-61-1.

That background matters because of what Stillman has not yet said. The college competes in the NAIA as a member of the HBCU Athletic Conference. Neither the August announcement nor Thursday’s release says what level of football the team will play, where it will play, what the program will cost, or how it will be funded. Thursday’s release says details on recruiting, staff, and the return to competition “will be announced as plans are finalized.”

Why Stillman Says It Is Doing This

Stillman’s August announcement framed football as an investment in the whole college. Board of Trustees Chair Joe Hampton said it represents “an opportunity to strengthen enrollment, student life, alumni engagement, and our connection to the broader community.” The college said the program would be built on “academic achievement, student-athlete development, competitive excellence, and fiscal responsibility,” and that it would ask alumni, donors, businesses, and community partners to support it.

Enrollment is the clearest case for it. In fall 2024, Stillman enrolled 731 undergraduates, 58 percent of them women. Only 75 of its 148 first-time students were men. A football roster adds a large group of students in a single year, most of them men, at a college where men make up the smaller half of campus.

The Department Keaton Inherits

Stillman’s athletics department is lean. In the 2024-25 school year, it sponsored 11 teams across seven sports with 159 athletes, about one in four full-time undergraduates. The entire department cost just over $1 million.

Most head coaching jobs were part-time, and the average head coach salary was about $14,400 for men’s teams and $16,300 for women’s teams. The department reported no recruiting spending.

For comparison, What Shaw University’s Own Records Show as Alumni Go to the Attorney General details a Shaw football program that cost $1.30 million in the same school year, more than Stillman spent on every sport combined.

The lineup has already shifted. Stillman’s 2026-27 roster of sports no longer includes bowling and now includes women’s flag football.

The College Behind the Program

On paper, Stillman’s finances are stable. Its audit for the 2024-25 school year carried a clean opinion with no findings, after the college resolved five findings from the year before. Its score on the U.S. Department of Education’s financial responsibility test was 2.6, comfortably above the 1.5 passing mark. It holds about $19.6 million in permanent endowment funds.

The same audit shows how thin the margins are. Stillman spent $25.2 million and took in $24.6 million, a gap of about $545,000. That result included $2.3 million in investment income, up from $78,000 the year before. Without investment results, the shortfall was closer to $2.6 million.

Stillman’s borrowing is short-term. It owed $8.1 million on three lines of credit, all due within a year, and its current liabilities of $12.8 million exceeded its current assets of $8.9 million. Students owed the college $20.2 million in accumulated tuition, fees, room and board, and Stillman has set aside $14.5 million of that as unlikely to be collected.

Spending leans heavily toward administration. In the 2023-24 school year, college-wide support accounted for 61 percent of Stillman’s core spending, compared with 22 percent for instruction.

The Tuition Math

The financial case for football at a small college runs through enrollment, not ticket sales. Edward Waters Turns Down Division I Paydays and Explains Why Football Already Pays for Itself lays out the model: a large roster on partial scholarships can bring in more tuition than the program costs.

Stillman’s published tuition and required fees are $12,126, unchanged from 2024-25 to 2025-26. Stillman has not said how many players it will carry or how many scholarships it will fund, so the figures below are hypothetical, not reported data. They assume the program plays in the NAIA, which limits football to 24 scholarship equivalencies, and that those scholarships are applied to tuition.

Those figures do not include housing and meal charges for players who live on campus, which run $9,640 a year, or other aid that lowers what some students pay. They also leave out the program’s costs: coaches, equipment, travel, insurance, and a place to play.

Two factors will decide whether the math works. The first is retention. A little more than half of the full-time students who started at Stillman in fall 2023 returned for a second year, and a roster built largely from first-year students would need to keep its players enrolled for the tuition to keep coming. The second is collection. A roster adds revenue only to the extent the college collects what it bills, and Stillman already carries a large balance of unpaid student accounts.

The Title IX Question

A football roster would also reshape Stillman’s athletics participation. Women made up 58.5 percent of full-time undergraduates in 2024-25 but 42.8 percent of athletes, a gap of about 16 points. Adding a 100-player roster without adding women’s opportunities would push women’s share of athletes to about 26 percent.

Proportional participation is one of three ways a school can show it complies with Title IX, so the numbers alone are not a finding. Stillman’s new women’s flag football team is one step the college has already taken. How Stillman plans to balance a football roster with opportunities for women is one question the relaunch will have to answer.

On scholarships, women already fare well. They received 57 percent of Stillman’s athletic aid in 2024-25, more than their share of athletes.

What Comes Next

Keaton has done this before, at Stillman and at Allen. Stillman’s announcements so far have covered who and when. The questions still ahead are the ones the college’s own numbers raise:

• What level will Stillman football play at, and does the college intend to pursue NCAA Division II and the SIAC again?
• What will the program cost to launch, and how much has been raised?
• How many players and scholarships does Stillman plan to carry?
• Where will the team play?
• Will Stillman add more opportunities for women alongside football?

Stillman says it will have answers as plans are finalized. The college has about a year before the 2027-28 academic year begins.