UH opponents double dip their way to the bank

Whether the University of Nevada-Las Vegas football team beats Hawaii or not, their Nov. 22 game at Aloha Stadium has already made the Rebels winners at the bank.

On one hand, UH will pay UNLV $150,000 to make the Mountain West Conference excursion. On another, last week the Rebels leveraged the so-called "Hawaii exemption" to add a 13th game, a Sept. 20 nonconference contest at Houston, that will pay them $400,000.

Depending upon how thrifty they are and how sharp their travel agent is, the Rebels could bank a cool $350,000 to $400,000 from the double dip. All the while touching down in two areas, Hawaii and Texas, that have been prime recruiting spots.

If you are UH, in this time of austerity especially, that has to be almost as galling as … well, UNLV’s last-gasp game-winning field goal last fall.

As UH counts its pennies and flies commercial while shelling out six figures for its conference opponents to fly charters here, it is the latest — but hardly the only — reminder of why the whole "travel cost sharing" scheme should be revisited.

Nor is UNLV alone in double dipping. Utah State will earn $175,000 for its Nov. 1 trip here and stands to add hundreds of thousands more with the trip to Tennessee that the 13th game helps provide.

But, in what will be UH’s three years in the Mountain West, Colorado State is the moneyball leader with $175,000 to come here last season and a $1.5 million check from Alabama. The Rams out double-dipped New Mexico, which got $175,000 from UH and $1 million from Texas in 2012.

As a condition of joining the MWC, UH agreed to pay what official documents termed "travel cost sharing" to the tune of $150,000 for teams from the Pacific time zone and $175,000 for those from beyond. 

Nobody "shares" with UH when the Rainbow Warriors hit the road in conference.

And, since nobody held a gun to the heads of the folks at Bachman Hall when UH eagerly signed the membership deal in 2011, that’s fine.

But conference members that elect to avail themselves of the 13th game, whether for an additional home game or a lucrative road guarantee, should have to choose one or the other. Take — and we’ll call it what it actually is — the "travel subsidy" from UH or the 13th game check. 

If they take the 13th game, many years that would save UH $300,000 to 350,000.

Washington, UH’s season-opening foe, will get a paycheck to come here Aug. 30 and tack on a 13th game, but the difference is UH got a payday when it went to Seattle.

The "Hawaii exemption" was the brainchild of Henry "Hank" Vasconcellos, football coach and visionary athletic director at UH from 1952 to ’60. He conceived and shepherded through the NCAA in 1955 the legislation that permits teams coming to Hawaii to play an extra contest (an 11th game in those days). The idea was to promote competition for UH by allowing visitors to recoup the cost of coming here with an extra game.

While his successors grapple with the present-day situation, somewhere you imagine "Hank" is rolling in his grave at how things have turned out.

Reach Ferd Lewis at flewis@staradvertiser.com or 529-4820.