We would surely understand if new University of Hawaii football coach Nick Rolovich heard the news last week, took it all into consideration, leaned back in his office chair, stared at the ceiling and expelled a deep, grim sigh.
The reality of the challenge for the football program at UH-Manoa was etched in stark detail following Clemson’s victory over outmanned and discombobulated Oklahoma in the Orange Bowl, site for the semi-final playoff leading up to next Monday’s championship game.
More on that in a moment, first a little background to set the scene. Because we are talking about college football and playoffs, we are necessarily discussing money and how much of it the NCAA and its subsidiary, the College Football Playoff wasted last week by ignoring the advice of virtually everyone within and without the organization.
Depending on a number of factors, including viewership, television pays from $600 million to $1.5 billion to broadcast these games in the second year of its contract.
This cartel that runs college football would not listen to analysts who know better so the nation was delivered playoffs on New Year’s Eve. They thought they were important enough to change an American tradition of New Year’s Eve festivities that has gone on for generations, but again, as widely forecast, they were wrong.
The overnight numbers came in, ratings were down 38 percent for one game, 36 percent for the other game. On the plus side, the ratings for the Orange Bowl did draw more viewers (15 million) than the first episode of the new season of Sherlock on PBS (9.7 million).
Congratulations, College Football Playoff, you topped a BBC detective show on PBS. Maybe next time you can challenge Diners, Drive-ins and Dives for ratings.
The vast majority of college sports’ issues come back to money and the absurd way the NCAA allocates its billions in revenue. In an atmosphere of political correctness it likes to publicly display, you would think the NCAA would employ a financial system that gives everyone a chance, but it has done just the opposite. Its top-heavy, have-and-have-nots system rewards the big schools and leaves the equivalent of bus tokens for everyone else, including schools such as Hawaii, in the same division and expected to compete with the big money schools.
The widening gap between super rich schools and everybody else was clearly defined last week when Steve Berkowitz of USA Today reported Clemson coach Dabo Swinney got a $400,000 bonus for winning the semi-final game. The next biggest playoff bonus among the four in the playoffs was $50,000, according to USA Today. This is on top of the millions Clemson boosters are pouring in to construct an exclusive football players’ playpen that will include miniature golf, its own gaming rooms, food service, a movie theater and more. It will almost be like not being in college at all, as close as you can get from your own private elitist compound.
So when future Clemson football players go out in the world, 95 percent of them will never play football again, but they will be sent out with a freshly pampered and privileged background from a school creating a double standard among its students precisely so the football players will feel separate from and somehow more worthy than “just plain students.” Good luck with that.
Swinney gets $400 k for winning one playoff game, while eight schools in the same division, according to Berkowitz’ research, pay head football coaches less than $400,000 to work 12 months. Rolovich escaped that group, sort of. His salary after taking over for Norm Chow, has been reported to be $400,008 in his first season. Hey, Nick we threw in an extra $8, buy yourself a burger if you can.
When the balance is tipped so heavily to the big money football factories that it allows one coach to make more by winning a single game than other coaches make all year, your organization is fiscally out of control and about to implode. They could share revenues more equitably, building strength from the bottom or they could do what they do now and generate a worth-lots and worth-less culture and hope it all works out.
It won’t work out, not over the long haul.
You can’t throw feasts and banquets on a weekly basis for the super rich, dump the leftovers at the doors of the poor and hope it all works out, but this is what the NCAA has done. The NCAA is a financial Potemkin Village, it looks and sounds good on the outside, but there’s nothing behind the hype.
How can a multi-billion dollar business like the NCAA allow such blatant, unjustifiable financial disparity to continue to exist?
My guess is they are too busy counting their money to pay attention.
