Last Saturday in Asheville was mostly spectacular, as many fall Saturdays in such a place are. For the first time this year anyone could remember, the temperatures dropped into the 40s and 50s and the air was mighty clean high on a mountain in the log vacation home our extended family rented for family weekend at the University of North Carolina at Asheville.

On campus, Chancellor Anne Ponder appeared at several gatherings to field questions from parents and kinfolk. A most gifted and enthusiastic leader she is, and not afraid of questions large and small -- though most questions from parents were friendly indeed, and everyone seemed to really enjoy the comment from one parent that her daughter had transferred to UNC-A from a certain highfalutin school in Durham and really liked Asheville. And her child wasn't the only "transfer-in" that had chosen UNC-A over a larger place.

One thing Dr. Ponder didn't have to worry about last Saturday was entertaining bigwigs in some skybox in a football stadium as they cheered on the lads on the field and did a little microanalysis of every play. She did not have to worry about the booster club coming up with a million bucks to lure St. Coach the Almighty from his current throne, or fret about whether St. Coach would demand new facilities, a resodding of the field, regular pedicures and manicures, a little loosening of those annoying academic standards and a human sacrifice every year on his birthday.

Nope, it was nice and quiet on campus, and every single student and faculty member our group encountered was positively eager to talk about how much they liked their school. Not once did I see hollow-eyed alums or young scholars wandering 'round like characters out of a horror film, seeking a football stadium and craving the familiar waft of stale beer and old hotdogs. Nor did I see alums gathered in emergency meetings in skyboxes or maybe even just in the parking lot reckoning as to whether it was time to pay off this coach and run another one on. No one seemed deprived or in withdrawal.

Oh, there's sports and plenty of it at UNC-Asheville. The school plays at the highest level of competition in the collegiate basketball ranks -- led by a former N.C. State player and coach, 62-year-old Eddie Biedenbach, an affable fellow who's brought the school some conference championships. The baseball team is top-notch. Women's sports are strong and popular. Better facilities are in the offing, but they'll fit in with the school's priorities of academics first. Get a load of this: the athletes tend to be among the best students.

The subject comes to mind because of a recent trend, as reported last Sunday on The News & Observer's front page, of smaller schools deciding to establish football programs. Doing so means having to raise good-sized money and entering into the world of constant spending on facilities and coaches. The downsides, in other words, are considerable.

Reasonable people make the upside argument: alumni support gets stronger, at small schools students have a regular weekend activity for the duration of football season, the school's profile increases (and thus, perhaps, donations and applications). And there's that long-held image of football as sort of a symbol of the college "experience."

What price "experience"? Well, if you're "big time," as they say, you need to raise (usually from boosters) a couple of million a year for the coach, and then plan on spending, oh, tens of millions of dollars on top of tens of millions of dollars to enhance football facilities of one kind or another. Smaller schools spend, too, though not on that scale.

Are there moments of unbelievable glory and good feeling? To be sure. The biggest sports story of the year in the entire country might already have happened -- Appalachian State's football victory over the University of Michigan. David takes Goliath down again, and you have to love that. Likewise Wake Forest's march to a championship last season.

But at many schools football is a multimillion-dollar money pit. Those colleges and universities that have not gotten into the business just have a hard time justifying it, making it work in terms of logic, and they ought to look down to that river before everybody jumps holding an inner tube. The world will not end if some schools choose to go without football. The sun will still come up, the trees will still grow, the wind will blow. And in one place I know, the air is most clean and sweet. Even without a stadium in sight.