Keeping up with the Joneses or, in this case, the Boise States and Colorado States, is about to get more expensive for University of Hawaii football.
The NCAA has before it a proposal to let the 128 Football Bowl Subdivision teams add a 10th assistant coach.
Teams are currently permitted a head coach and nine full-time, on-field assistants. That does not include analysts, quality control staffers, recruiting coordinators, video personnel, operations staff who have off-the-field responsibilities.
The strong likelihood is the 10th assistant position will be approved, the only question is when they will start: in two months or Jan. 9, 2018.
The Power Five Conference schools are chomping for an April start while several of the less well-heeled favor Jan. 2018 — or later — so they can try to come up with the moolah or rearrange their staffs.
UH is one of those shaking the piggy bank and checking behind the seat cushions for small change. Athletic director David Matlin said in an email the Rainbow Warriors “do not currently have funding for it.”
The ’Bows’ salary pool for their nine assistants is already approximately $1.2 million and adding another position probably means an additional $80,000-$120,000 plus benefits, depending upon the amount of experience a new coach brings. The average UH assistant made more than $120,000 last year and the ceiling on assistants who are not coordinators is $165,000.
For UH, this latest exercise is less about the insanity of trying to keep up with the big bucks marquee schools such as Michigan and Alabama, and more about the fear of falling further behind some of their Mountain West Conference peers.
Boise State and Colorado State, for example, are at least a couple hundred thousand dollars ahead of UH in assistant salaries while offering a lower cost of living.
If you saw the Michigan sideline when the ’Bows played in Ann Arbor in September, what the Wolverines had wasn’t a coaching staff as much as an army. In addition to their nine assistants — and head coach Jim Harbaugh — the Wolverines’ staff is composed of seven operations people, four analysts, five personnel staffers and a performance director plus the allowable contingent of graduate assistants.
“I just know there were a lot of people in head sets and khakis,” Nick Rolovich said.
At Alabama, it looks more like an NFL front office and it is not uncommon these days for the brand name schools to have football staffs of 25-30 people while UH and its peers are running 13-16.
For schools such as UH it isn’t just about a disparity in numbers. There is also the fear that some of the marquee teams — those that do not already have a their prospective 10th assistant stashed in an analyst job in anticipation of the rule change — will poach from their ranks.
Sort of like losing your defensive coordinator to Michigan.
There are, of course, some arguments that can be made for an expanded coaching staff such as improving the player-to-coach ratio at a level where 105-man rosters are the rule rather than exception.
But there is also an element of excess, expanding because football can. We’ve seen it in facilities, cost of attendance stipends and more.
Never mind that more than 80 percent of Division I athletic departments run at a deficit. In the athletic arms race, nowhere is the competition more furious than college football, which brings in the most money and knows few bounds in trying to out-spend the other guy.
Reach Ferd Lewis at flewis@staradvertiser.com or 529-4820.
