For football Warriors, 12 is worth more than 13

Logic tells us that if the University of Hawaii can play 13 football games in a season, it is better for it to do so than play 12.

Especially if that one additional game is at home.

Usually, this is true. Football is the most popular UH sport. Football brings in the money that helps fund the rest of the athletic department.

It’s the flagship and the workhorse.

But the Warriors’ 2012 regular season will just be 12 games, like those of most other FBS schools. UH will not take advantage of the NCAA-sanctioned Hawaii Exemption that allows it and the schools it hosts to add a game above the normal maximum (12). The theory is the exemption helps alleviate expenses incurred crossing the Pacific Ocean by allowing another profitable home game.

A 13-game schedule is still technically possible, but athletic director Jim Donovan says adding the type of opponent it could get now might not be financially feasible. He said that after a $250,000 guarantee and

$90,000-100,000 operation costs for the stadium, “we’d have to have 40,000 people to break even.”

So unless a Notre Dame or Ohio State falls out of the sky — and that ain’t happening — 12 games it is.

Can a UH football game be a losing financial proposition? Perhaps, if you have to grab what you can get when you can — like in 2007 when then-AD Herman Frazier needed a 12th game and had little choice but to book Charleston Southern on terms that would make a loan shark blush.

Even then, due to blind luck and a great on-field product for the regular season, that all somehow worked out OK money-wise for UH. The team went 12-0, and despite two of the wins coming against FCS opponents the Warriors found themselves in the Sugar Bowl, UH’s pockets full of the BCS appearance money that comes with it.

THINGS ARE different five years later, and the Warriors’ hopes of an undefeated season will likely end in the season opener against USC at the L.A. Coliseum.

UH thought it was set for 2012 with a 13-game schedule, but Texas State dropped out. And since there was no signed contract yet, Hawaii doesn’t even get a cancellation fee, like the $250,000 it pried from Michigan State when the Spartans bailed from the 2007 schedule.

That leaves Hawaii with a 2012 home schedule of Lamar, Nevada, New Mexico, Boise State, UNLV and South Alabama. Would another FCS team like Lamar on Sept. 8 fill the house for coach Norm Chow’s home opener a week after a possible big loss at USC? Given the current widespread popularity of Hawaii’s first homegrown coach in more than 30 years, maybe. But we’ll never know.

Six home games instead of seven will cut into season-ticket sales, especially since prices won’t be lowered.

The 2013 nonconference slate is much more attractive, as UH hosts USC, BYU and Army. Washington and Oregon State are on the docket for 2014.

If UH needs a late replacement for those seasons, it should be somewhat easier because of the year-to-year inexactness of the calendar.

In 2013 and 2014, the college football season spans 15 weeks instead of the usual 14. That means BCS conference schools can add a 13th game, leave room for a conference title game and still have a bye.

Hopefully for UH, by 2015 when the calendar reverts, the NCAA will have approved a corollary to the Hawaii Exemption allowing a one-week schedule expansion on the front end for teams playing in Hawaii.

It makes sense and sounds simple enough. But most things expanding a sports season get the university presidents worked up. Yes, those same folks don’t seem to have a problem with the ridiculous amount of time between the end of the regular season and the bowl games, or the college basketball season that spans six months.

The Hawaii Exemption began to lose value when the max games went from 11 to 12 and again with the advent of conference championship games. Without this schedule exception it will continue to head toward useless.

As one college football official said, “No one wants to play 13 games in 13 weeks.”

This is especially true when one of the games is in Hawaii. A bye is nearly imperative after a road game in the islands.