The Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University basketball team is going the extra mile — and thousands more, besides — for its financially challenged athletic program.

The Rattlers (0-1), who provide the opposition for the University of Hawaii’s season opener tonight, will log the equivalent of nearly a trip around the world before they play so much as a home game of their own back in Tallahassee.

The Stan Sheriff Center and the three-night Rainbow Classic mark the second of 13 consecutive road games, spread over eight states and nearly 25,000 miles, that FAMU will make criss-crossing the country in the 73 days preceding its first home game. Not until Jan. 11, 2020 against Morgan State do the Rattlers compete in the Lawson Center.

“It (the schedule) is a bear,” acknowledges a team official wearily.

They are wrestling this particular bear for the benefit of the school’s sagging bottom line. The Rattlers have long been on a have team, will travel-for-paychecks footing in a coast-to-coast string of what are known as “guarantee games.”

They arrive here off a 77-48 loss at USC and, in coming weeks, will play at Seton Hall (New Jersey), Kansas State, Tennessee, Portland, Washington State, Seattle, Iowa State … well, you get the idea.

“You’re guaranteed a paycheck and you’re guaranteed a loss,” a former FAMU coach, Mike Gillespie, was fond of saying amid a streak of what became 12 consecutive losing seasons.

The necessity of playing “guarantee” games has been a financial fact of life in the Mid-Eastern Athletic Conference and Southwestern Athletic Conference, two traditionally black college and university leagues UH has heavily drawn from in selecting nonconference opponents.

At FAMU, the guarantees provide desperately needed revenue for the athletic department of a small (6,852 enrollment) school that has run up a string of deficits totaling $9 million, according to a Tallahassee newspaper. It reported last month that the school will cut two of its teams as a deficit-reducing measure.

Not until the game guarantees top $750,000, according to terms of the head coach’s contract, does the men’s basketball team get to hang onto some of the funds that it generates to help underwrite its own operations.

UH was not immediately able to make the contract available and FAMU declined to comment on the amounts of its guarantees.

The years of traipsing across the country for paydays have had an impact on the Rattlers’ win column and in the classroom. Only recently, under third-year head coach Robert McCullum, have they begun to emerge from the inevitable fallout.

Last year’s 9-7 finish in the MEAC (12-19 overall record), marked the Rattlers’ first winning season in conference since 2006-07. And its victory at Jacksonville was its first nonconference triumph since 2014.

A spokesman said every player who has completed his eligibility and played his senior year has graduated in McCullum’s tenure, a significant turnaround after years of NCAA-imposed penalties for substandard Academic Progress Rating scores.

Officials said an academic adviser now travels with the team on all road games and, with tight scheduling, the players will miss no more than eight classroom days for the first semester.

For the Rattlers, geography and economics are subjects not only to be found in textbooks, but lived on an in-season basis.

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