Warriors won’t play Temple after all

The Hawaii and Temple football teams will not play each other this season after negotiations between the two schools collapsed.

The proposal called for the game to be played Dec. 7 at Aloha Stadium. Officials said final negotiations fell apart Monday night.

"The numbers didn’t add up," UH acting athletic director Rockne Freitas said. "I’m not going to blame anybody. We would have taken a huge loss on the game."

Temple athletic director Bil Bradshaw said in a news release Tuesday: "Temple University went above and beyond normal procedures in an effort to provide our student-athletes with the opportunity to play a 12th football game this season. Unfortunately, that will not be possible as our negotiations with the University of Hawaii have ended. We felt we had an agreement in place with the University of Hawaii, but in the end, its administration was unable to fulfill it due to unforeseen circumstances."

Temple, which initially proposed the game in July, was willing to pay for its travel expenses and not accept an appearance fee.

Despite Temple’s concessions, Freitas said, UH would have lost money.

UH usually pays Aloha Stadium about $100,000 per game for fixed and out-of-pocket costs. Aloha Stadium officials were willing to substantially lower that fee.

UH’s expenses would have been as high as $80,000.

"I tried diligently to cut the costs, but the numbers didn’t work out," Freitas said.

Freitas said he would not have charged admission for season-ticket holders.

Freitas said UH has averaged 3,600 walk-up sales for each home game this year. There were 440 walk-up sales for last weekend’s game against Boise State.

Freitas praised Bradshaw and Aloha Stadium manager Scott Chan for offering to make concessions. Freitas said the game would have been good for both teams.

In the end, Freitas said, "the University of Hawaii is a public university. I treat the public’s money like it’s mine. I cross every ‘T’ and dot every ‘I.’ And I’m very frugal about how I spend my own money. We wanted to play the game, but the numbers didn’t match up."