Football coach Norm Chow got a pat on the back from director Ben Jay for the team’s efforts to comply with the University of Hawaii athletic department’s new austerity budget.

But that isn’t applause from the Mountain West Conference, where the dollars to be saved will help underwrite the cost of charter flights for UH opponents who come to Aloha Stadium.

Snickering, maybe.

“I look up at the MWC (football) meetings and they are laughing at (us),” Chow said. “They are coming over here (to Hawaii) all stretched out on charters and you know what we’re doing, right? We’re sitting in the back of the (commercial) plane.”

According to UH figures, the Rainbow Warriors expect to spend $1,103,930 on travel to their six road games this season, an approximately 32,000-mile odyssey that takes them to both coasts chiefly via commercial flights.

The NFL’s most well-traveled team last year, the Oakland Raiders, covered 28,692 miles, according to the league.

Remarkably, despite the rise in fuel and other prices over the past three years, the ‘Bows could come in under the $1,148,166 listed for 2010, when they also went coast-to-coast.

“Norm and his people have done a good job; he understands the financial situation we’re in,” Jay said. “I mean, it is what it is. I can’t print money.”

With the athletic department pledged to balance its books this fiscal year after Manoa Chancellor Tom Apple won approval to “forgive” a $15 million accumulated net deficit, UH’s 21 teams have been ordered to toe a tight bottom line. One calculated to meet a $30 million budget that is expected to be about $2 million below the previous year when audited figures come in.

“Everything is cut to the bone,” Chow said. “Believe me, Lavanna (Francisco), Brad (Jones) and Lacey (Lavarias), our travel and staff people, worked hard.”

Chow said the team will leave a day later on some trips than it might have otherwise and forego some charters. It will dine away from some of its hotels to save on meal costs.

Meanwhile, UH is still required to underwrite the travel of its four conference visitors to the tune of $625,000 this season, $150,000 each for San Jose State, Fresno State and San Diego State and $175,000 for Colorado State. The “travel cost sharing” — as the MWC terms it — was a condition of membership for UH, which receives no subsidies in return.

That is the deal UH agreed to in 2010 but not the one it should be stuck with now. A lot has happened since then, the addition of San Jose State and Utah State, for example. And the return of San Diego State and Boise State. Yet UH still pays the tab for all.

 Contrast that with the more enlightened Big West, where most of UH’s other teams compete, and any school that joins after UH is on its own for travel. The thought being that whomever follows UH in the door knows the situation.

In the meantime, Chow says, “we’re not gonna complain. We’re just gonna get on a plane and go play.”

As cheaply as possible, of course.

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