The Board of Regents Committee on Intercollegiate Athletics quickly agreed Thursday it wasn’t interested in eliminating any University of Hawaii athletic teams, at this time.
Can we all now also please agree that the specter of cutting teams shall not be raised again on campus unless the issue really is on the table and the cutlery is being sharpened?
Hopefully that time, largely unseen in 38 years at UH, will not soon be revisited.
Twice in six months and three times in two years, officials, in spoken or printed word, have held out or invited the possibility of cutting a team — or teams — as a means to illustrate the depth of the department’s mounting financial struggles.
The idea being, apparently, to jolt people into the realization that things are really, truly, honestly dire, And, of course, to galvanize action. Desperate measures for desperate situations.
In that, the 93-page "Financial State of Hawaii Athletics: Version 2.0 — Revising the Game Plan" presented to regents was a much-needed clarion, underlining just how out of date the UH athletic business model is for the current environment and how the department lags behind the herd in too many areas of support.
Back when UH was still averaging upwards of 35,000 per football game — while playing nine home games a season with no pay-per-view — and not paying travel subsidies, the model worked.
But things have changed in the past 15 years. After several seasons in which UH broke even or banked a surplus, the string of what will be 12 deficits in 14 fiscal years (nine of them exceeding $1.5 million, according to the report), UH’s financial blueprint has barely been updated.
To be sure, all but 28 of 228 schools also wade in some red ink, according to a 2013 survey by USA Today. But they have either the means to write it off or have managed the tide to a level their overseers can live with.
We know this because only Alabama-Birmingham on the FBS level has packed its pads in mothballs and hardly anybody else is holding out the possibility of following suit.
Meanwhile, UH’s plaintive cries are registering afar. In Heisman Trophy interviews in December, Marcus Mariota was asked about the apparent incongruity of him winning college football’s biggest award while back in his home state UH might shutter football. In a discussion of the struggles of mid-major programs at the IMG Intercollegiate Athletic Forum, there were questions about whether UH would become the next UAB.
We can only wonder how much this complicated an already uphill recruiting campaign.
On Thursday, sailing coach Andy Johnson, who has two national titles, saw his program listed among the "options" if UH was going make cuts. As a result, he was having to reassure incoming recruits the program would still be afloat when they get here.
So, people are listening to UH’s plight. Whether they are the right people to bring change or are suitably inspired to do so remains to be seen.
At the risk of becoming the department that cried "wolf" and everybody tuning out the important underlying message, can we cut threats of non-impending cuts?
Reach Ferd Lewis at flewis@staradvertiser.com.
