Jay made the right call to not add a road game

The way the University of Hawaii football team limped home from Nevada on Saturday, it would have been hard to justify adding a school-record seventh road game to the schedule.

Wisely, athletic director Ben Jay isn’t going to try.

Instead, he made the probably fiscally difficult but correct decision Monday to reject a proposed Oct. 19 game at Colorado. 

When you have lost nine consecutive road games dating to 2011, have suffered mounting injuries by the week this season and still have four road games, including an East Coast jaunt remaining, it would take a mercenary soul to pack this team off on an added — purely for a paycheck — expedition.

A LOT OF PEOPLE in college athletics like to trot out the phrase “what is good for our student-athletes,” all the while paying greater homage to the bottom line when push comes to shove. The term “student-athlete” originated with the public-relations savvy NCAA leader Walter Byers ages ago and has been employed to help dodge a worker’s comp case.

In this case, UH not only talked the talk where its “student-athletes” were concerned, but when cash was flashed, it also walked the walk.

UH walked away from what, by most estimates, could have been a pretty compelling pile of moolah. It probably wasn’t easy, given the reported $600,000 Colorado eventually offered up after some heavy back and forth negotiation. Especially since the $300,000 to $325,000 UH might have realized after expenses would have come in handy for an athletic department struggling to balance the books this fiscal year after too many audits in the red.

Would UH’s resolve have been the same in the face of, say, a $750,000 to $800,000 offer and the charter flights and lucrative profit it could have underwritten? We’ll never know because the Buffaloes, who will pay UH $500,000 to come to Boulder for next year’s previously scheduled game, apparently weren’t going to go that high.

WHAT WE DO KNOW is that this UH team is already booked for more than 32,000 travel miles this season and needs another 6,700 miles like it needs more dropped passes and turnovers. It already has three road games in the five-week period between Oct. 10 and Nov. 10 and has no compelling reason to give up an open date and add a fourth.

UH football players missed an average of 18.7 days of school each season of 2008 to ’10 and 19 in 2011, according to school officials. They are figures that have already raised concerns.

If given a ballot, the players might well vote to have taken the game. You would expect them to. Fans want as many games as they can get, too. Preferably on a widely available free channel, of course.

Media want more games to cover.

But somebody in charge at UH needs to know where and when to draw the line. Somebody has to be the voice of reason.

After rounds of negotiation, putting a calculator to the numbers and, ultimately you have to think, observing winless UH limp off the field at Mackay Stadium on Saturday, somebody was.

Jay got it right.

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