The Register Citizen (Torrington, CT)
Schedule shifted to include USF
What probably turned out to be a year’s worth of phone conversations in a span of a week, resulted in the UConn football team’s previously postponed game against South Florida being rescheduled to November 4.
American Athletic Conference foes Cincinnati, East Carolina and Houston had to agree to changes in their schedules, while UMass called off its game with USF in order to allow the shift in game dates to be finalized.
“It was very important to us to try to get the game rescheduled for a lot of different reasons, for our fans, for our student-athletes and certainly the opportunity to play a full schedule, which is very important to our program right now,” UConn Director of Athletic David Benedict said in a conference call. “Coach (Randy) Edsall, he is trying to build a program here and to have one less game and one less opportunity to work with your kids would have been difficult to manage.”
Benedict said he provided a figure of $650,000 to the AAC concerning the potential loss of revenue if UConn was unable to make up the home date.
The Huskies, who play their road opener against Virginia on Saturday were supposed to be off next week. However, East Carolina has agreed to play at UConn on Sept. 24. Originally that game was scheduled to be on Nov. 4, but that week needed to be cleared so UConn and USF could play their game.
USF will host Cincinnati on Oct. 14, replacing a previously scheduled game against Massachusetts, and will host Houston on Oct. 28, replacing the original game against Cincinnati. East Carolina will now face Houston on Nov. 4. UMass replaced the USF game with one against FIU.
“I never lost hope, I never lost optimism throughout the process, but there were
a lot of different scenarios that they went through to try to make this happen,” Benedict said. “I can’t tell you if this was the fifth, sixth or seventh scenario, but they worked it. I hand it to the conference, they could have shelved it. They could have said, ‘look we tried a lot of different ways
and it didn’t work.’ To go to the extent that they have, it really says a lot.”
New York City FC’s MLS game with the Houston Dynamos was moved to Rentschler Field on Sept. 23 due to Hurricane Harvey. As a result, the UConn football game is now on Sunday, which will make for a short week for the Huskies, who have a game at Southern Methodist on Sept. 30.
Benedict said he doesn’t anticipate the soccer match impacting the quality of the field, but there will be a quick turnaround to get the logos painted on the field in time for the East Carolina game.
The USF/UConn game was originally scheduled for last week, but was called off because of travel concerns for the visiting USF team due to the expected impact Hurricane Irma was going to have on the Tampa area. Since the Bulls and Huskies did not have the same bye week, the AAC needed to make multiple adjustments to get the game played.
The AAC announced it is working to reschedule the Memphis/UCF game, which was also unable to be played over the weekend.
Details on refunds should be announced by UConn in the next week for fans that had bought tickets for last week’s game, but don’t wish to come to either the East Carolina or South Florida home games.