UH doesn’t need to play Colorado that badly

While the University of Hawaii ponders whether to accept an offer to play an additional football game at Colorado next month, here’s something to chew on:

If UH takes Colorado up on its proposal of an Oct. 19 game in Boulder, the Rainbow Warriors figure to travel more miles in a one-month span than 28 of the 32 NFL teams will cover in their entire regular season.

Between Oct. 10 and Nov. 10, UH would travel to and play four of five games on the road, racking up approximately 22,500 miles in the process.

In just that span, the ‘Bows would touch down in Las Vegas, Boulder, Logan, Utah, and Annapolis, Md., with a couple trips back home to Honolulu for familiarity’s sake, spending at least 17 days away or in transit. Then, 11 days later, it is off to Laramie, Wyo.

That might be considered part of the job if you’re Anthony Bourdain or National Geographic, but it shouldn’t be for students ostensibly in pursuit of a college degree.

Even the term "long distance learning" would take on new, tortured meaning with a Boulder foray, running UH’s season total to nearly 40,000 miles for a school-record seven road games that began this month with trips to Oregon State and Nevada.

That makes for a brutal undertaking, one bound to take its toll both in the classroom and on the field on the very people the school likes to refer to as "student-athletes."

Forget about whether playing a 13th game might harm UH’s dubious chances at a postseason berth, the real issue here is academics and student welfare.

Unless UH has a roster full of geography and travel industry management majors in need of in-depth field work, it is hard to fathom how long periods of separation from campus are going to be of benefit. Other than their airline mileage accounts, that is.

Which is why the NCAA warned in its 2011 certification assessment of UH, that "travel should be scheduled so that missed class time is minimized."

A 2009 independent operational review commissioned by the UH Board of Regents noted, "one of the biggest challenges in meeting the standards of the (NCAA’s) Academic Performance Rating and Graduation Success Rate is the amount of missed class time due to the uniqueness of travel to Mainland competitions."

According to a UH self-study as part of the process for NCAA Division I certification, football players averaged 18.6 days of missed class time over a three-year period (2008-10). In 2011 that figure was 19 days, according to UH.

Financially strapped UH can use whatever moolah Colorado might be leveraged to offer up. And the Buffaloes, who are trying to dig their way out from under a seven-year-old $19 million accumulated net deficit, desperately need a home game to fill the puka left on the schedule by the flood-forced cancellation of last week’s Fresno State game.

But for all UH’s financial woes and the urgency to get back to balancing its books, is this really the way Manoa wants to go about doing it — on the travel-weary backs of its athletes?

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