When the USC football team comes to play against the University of Hawaii at Aloha Stadium in August, several thousand Trojans fans will accompany it. Many will stay in hotels, rent cars and purchase meals in restaurants (as will the team itself).

The fans will be tourists; some will stay in the islands longer than just a day or two.

Of course they won’t make anything close to the economic impact that the Pro Bowl does when the NFL’s best players come to Hawaii for a week. But they will put a significant amount of money into our cash registers.

And UH hosts six or seven football games and more than 100 competitions on campus each school year, so maybe the school deserves something a little closer to the $4 million the NFL gets rather than what UH got from the Hawaii Tourism Authority this year.

A little more than zero.

The money comes from the state tourism tax. We can continue the debate on another day if sports should be supported at all from this fund. But while they are, UH and the other local colleges that host mainland opponents who spend money here should get some of it.

UH athletics got $575,000 in corporate sponsorship from the HTA last year. But school sources say that has been cut back to nothing this year.

So, while it has been made clear that UH sports needs to develop revenue streams to continue as a Division I program, one of its existing sources has dried up after just one year.

Athletic director Ben Jay declined comment Tuesday. A spokeswoman said HTA officials were unavailable to answer questions.

Maybe today someone will explain how UH sports went from being worth a half-million-dollar HTA investment to zero, in one year. Did all the opposing teams start sleeping in tents on the beach instead of in hotel rooms? This is worse than the raw deal with Aloha Stadium.

Maybe UH will get HTA money again when the Pro Bowl isn’t here to take our $4 million. But it should every year, regardless.

In addition to the Pro Bowl, the HTA’s sports marketing program supports major pro golf events, Ironman and Xterra. It indirectly supports Chaminade via sponsorship of the EA Maui Invitational, and UH through the Diamond Head Classic and Sheraton Hawaii Bowl.

But mostly, local college sports programs are treated like second-class citizens by the HTA. The Honolulu Marathon has been ignored, too, despite its huge economic tourism impact. The difference is the marathon is solvent anyway, while the financial picture at UH athletics is so bleak that a $13 million accumulated deficit had to be absorbed by upper campus last week.

Someone recently proposed every state taxpayer be assessed $25 a year for UH sports. That’s even more ridiculous when you consider UH isn’t getting anything close to a fair deal from a logical public funding source like the tourism tax.

Whether the Pro Bowl continues in Hawaii or not, the state’s college sports programs should get some of this money their existence helps generate.

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Reach Dave Reardon at dreardon@staradvertiser.com or 529-4783.