To the surprise of nobody who has known him, SMU football coach June Jones is still rarin’ back and daring to throw deep.
From the coach who gave us passes off the fake punt on fourth-and-17 — and very little that was orthodox in nine seasons (1999-2007) as the University of Hawaii’s winningest football coach — comes this suggestion:
The five “have-not” conferences of major college football (American, Conference USA, Mid-American, Mountain West and Sun Belt) should band together, forget the fall and move their games to a spring season.
“Be different, go outside the box,” Jones said of a plan boldly laid out on WDEA radio in Tampa, Fla., the other day. “Or, as a group, we are going to be left behind.”
Whether you agree with Jones about the merits of playing in the spring and the number of obstacles that would have to be surmounted, he is right on about one thing: desperate times call for new, inventive measures.
And these are times growing more challenging for the mid-major schools, such as UH, by the day.
The so-called Power Five conferences (Atlantic Coast, Big Ten, Big 12, Pac-12 and Southeastern) have demanded autonomy be granted them by the NCAA, whose Board of Directors meets Aug. 7.
Once they achieve that — or, if they are turned down and strike out on their own apart from the NCAA — they will be able to pay players stipends as well as set their own rules and limits.
Already the divide in finance and facilities is huge and growing.
“Hawaii is like SMU; we all have to think about where we’re going to get the income,” said Jones, who envisions “a lot of schools dropping football otherwise.”
JONES’ SUGGESTION for a spring season is essentially a rewriting of the playbook of the late USFL (1982-85), where he once coached.
The USFL created a nice niche for itself playing in the spring and getting TV deals from ESPN and ABC. The mistake, well, one of them, anyway, was in eventually attempting to confront the NFL on its own turf and move to the fall. The USFL won a lawsuit against the NFL but was awarded just one dollar in damages and soon disbanded.
The problem with spring setting for colleges is getting enough of them to accept the notion and then buy in on several fronts.
One of them is to walk away from the College Football Playoff, the national championship format that debuts this season, and guarantees the five “havenots” $75 million to split among themselves.
That, of course, amounts to table scraps compared to the baseline $250 million USA Today said the Power Five will divide up in the first year of the 12-year deal, but more than came in during the BCS era.
Most of the Power Five schools are currently receiving $15 million-$25 million in regular-season TV money while the “have-nots” are lucky to get a fifth of that.
Jones envisions networks willing to pay more than the current “have-not” rates for football programming in the spring but acknowledges the rebranding process will take time and patience.
Whether it is a spring season or something else, the worst thing the “have-nots” can do is sit still while the landscape around them is rearranged.
Reach Ferd Lewis at flewis@staradvertiser.com or 529-4820.
