Playing the underdog at Utah will help pay off debt

Maybe you’ve noticed it takes a lot to get the University of Hawaii men’s basketball team to leave the rock for a nonconference game these days.

In the case of what will probably be the Rainbow Warriors’ only road game outside the Big West Conference this season, it is what figures to be a record check to pay off a two-year-old “debt” of sorts.

The ’Bows will play Utah on Dec. 2 at the Huntsman Center in Salt Lake City, their first nonconference game on the continent in two seasons.

For that trip UH said it will receive $105,000 plus hotel rooms. People who have dealt with contracts there for more than a decade say they believe it is the only basketball guarantee that has topped $100,000.

The payday will clear the books of the remainder of a $120,000 debt incurred when UH bought itself out of the 2015 Las Vegas Invitational in head coach Eran Ganot’s inaugural season.

Under the terms of the Vegas contract signed when Benjy Taylor was the interim coach, UH was originally booked to play single games at San Diego State and Cal plus two games in the Orleans Arena from among Liberty, Sam Houston and Bethune-Cookman, all for a total of $85,000.

But upon assuming the head coaching job Ganot sought to get out of the deal. Athletic director David Matlin, citing five days of missed class time and seven overall days away from campus, agreed to pay the buyout under a two-year plan to settle the accounts.

Between the receipts from two additional home games and plans to play two road “guarantee” games over two seasons, UH projected it would come out ahead.

The first road game, a 2015 visit to Texas Tech, came with a payday of $87,000 for an 82-74 loss.

The second “guarantee” game was supposed to have been last season, but UH “deferred” that to take up an opportunity to play in Fox Sports’ made-for-TV Pearl Harbor Invitational, where the ’Bows lost to Seton Hall and Princeton. The 10.3-mile trips to Bloch Arena were their only nonconference appearances away from Manoa.

So, the ’Bows’ first trip to the Utah campus since 1999, when the late Rick Majerus was their jovial host, becomes the debt closer.

Utah had a late opening on its schedule when a home game against Xavier had to be canceled due to a Big East Conference edict.

Avoiding the so-called “guarantee” or “buy” games — in which low and mid-major teams get hefty paydays to play the underdog in the home arenas of Power Five Conference members — is something UH has been largely able to do.

But it is a fiscal fact of life elsewhere among the ’Bows’ brethren in the Big West Conference, where some teams play as many as eight such games in a single season to help fund their athletics programs and pay coaches’ salaries. Long Beach State, for example, played at Wichita State, North Carolina, Louisville, UCLA, Washington, Kansas, Texas and Oregon State, going 0-for-8 in the process, this year for the money the games produced.

The Southwestern Athletic Conference, where UH draws many of its nonconference opponents (Arkansas-Pine Bluff, Prairie View A&M, Mississippi Valley State, etc.) from, also is well known for its opponent-for-hire availability.

Matlin said UH hopes to play one money road game a year from here on out but might not play any in seasons in which it can appear in multi-team or exempt events — such as the Maui Invitational, Great Alaska Shootout, etc.

Absent big money, big opportunity — or the repaying of a debt — UH would like to be a homebody.