Ferd Lewis: On-time start for football would soften blow to University of Hawaii athletics budget

University of Arizona president Robert C. Robbins’ comments this week about the likelihood of a “delayed” start to the college football season struck a particularly ominous tone for Hawaii, the Wildcats’ season-opening opponent.

Their Aug. 29 game in Tucson, now just 125 days away and counting, kicks off a schedule where the Rainbow Warriors’ best revenue opportunities of the season are very front-loaded.

Three of the Rainbow Warriors’ most lucrative games come in the first third of a 13-game schedule. UH is contracted to receive $400,000 for its visit to Arizona Stadium. The following week, Sept. 5, UH has what looms as its most attractive home date at Aloha Stadium in at least four years, a rare visit by UCLA. Two weeks later, the Warriors are scheduled to go to Oregon, where a $1 million check awaits them in Eugene.

If those games are played, that is.

Amid the curse of COVID-19 and the more urgent health and safety issues that surround it, Robbins, a renown cardiac surgeon and one-time football player, told a Tucson radio station, “You know, as much as I want it, it just seems as though if we do play any football in the fall, it is going to be delayed.”

He added, “It is going to be very difficult to start the (season) schedule as it currently exists” and said, “My sense is, right now, I just don’t see that happening.”

Robbins’ comments came just days after Craig Thompson, commissioner of the Mountain West Conference, where UH competes in football, suggested an early July date for determining whether the Labor Day window of games, Sept. 3-7, would be played.

Whether the season starts on time, UH, like the rest of the 130-school Football Bowl Subdivision, is going to take a financial beating from the impact of the COVID-19 crisis. The question is how painful and prolonged will it be?

With the cancellation of the NCAA Basketball Tournament, member schools are already bracing for approximately 37 cents on the dollar from what they would have gotten had March Madness played out. All this while they continue to shoulder the burden of rising costs, including salaries, and contend with dipping ticket sales, declining donations and sliding sponsorships.

The Group of Five conference commissioners, including Thompson, recently sent a letter to NCAA president Mark Emmert seeking economic relief from what they described as “the direst financial crisis for higher education since at least the Great Depression.”

But just how deep and how long lasting the financial plight might be will depend a lot on what happens with the football season. Whether fall football is truncated, pushed to the spring or flat-out canceled will help determine the severity of the the hemorrhaging.

And, as Thompson and others have warned, an absence of football would deal major blows to the entire range of sports, since football is the biggest breadwinner on most campuses helping to underwrite a host of non-income teams.

The vast majority of athletic departments, including UH’s, rely heavily on campus, state and student funds to operate. But those sources are also getting walloped by the impact of COVID-19 and their assistance in austere times figures to be lacking.

For UH, the more on-time the start to the season, health and safety permitting, the more to cheer about in a lot of ways.

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