The Register Citizen (Torrington, CT)
Is UConn football worth keeping alive?
The UConn football season is a corpse. It expired a few weeks ago at Rentschler Field in the rain with the conservative playcalling and a squandered fourth-quarter lead against UMass.
Or maybe the season ended when Zavier Scott fumbled the ball on the first drive of the opener Aug. 30 against Central Florida. If we’re being analytical, with nine autopsy reports filed, that’s the likely time of death. For beating anybody with a full FBC allotment of 85 scholarships and requisite shoulder pads has proven impossible for Randy Edsall’s team during this sad autumn.
There are three games and no hope remaining. RIP, 2018.
The question now is all-encompassing and so much more important: Is the UConn football program dead, too?
Athletic director David Benedict, Edsall and those dwindling numbers who support the Huskies no matter how awful would answer with a resounding, “No!”
Those who are sick of nearly a decade of football ignominy, those begging for a return to the basketball Big East may answer, “Hope so!”
That’s the question that
matters now, isn’t it? Is the program dead? If not, are there legitimate long-term prospects to make it worth keeping. Or will it ultimately become too much of a financial drain for a state university facing considerable financial obstacles.
Edsall proved long ago that given time, space and the fan patience of Job, he could go 7-5 and produce a bowl appearance in 2020 or 2021. So far down the line with Edsall, it would be foolish to fire him next year or any time before his contract expires in 2021. And, yes, we know there’s no buyout after Dec. 1, 2019.
The idea of starting all over again in say 2020 — with 2023 as the next circlethe-calendar date for conference realignment — would be self-defeating. That’s the year the network contracts start expiring. The biggest, perhaps only, legitimate argument for retaining football would be eventual entry into a new world of ruling conferences. With the consumption of content changing, who knows exactly how rights deals will work? Amazon, Google, Facebook and Twitter could have as much to say about conference alignment as ESPN and CBS. Hey, you can’t win the Football Powerball if you don’t play.
That doesn’t mean Edsall gets a free pass. He doesn’t. It means that even though he jilted UConn in the most unattractive way following the 2011 Fiesta Bowl, he was the one hand-picked to build UConn into a major college program. He has to be the one to save it.
If he can’t, blow it up. There I said it.
We’re not talking about dropping down to FCS. That’s a money pit. Nor going independent like UMass. We’re talking a strong look at dropping football.
The finances are not cutand-dried. So much of the multi-media and sponsorship money involving IMG, Nike, etc., involves football. Yet with 85 scholarships and so many expenses, football by far runs the largest deficit. It required a $7.5 million subsidy in absolute dollars in 2014, according to a 2017 UConn Senate University Budget Committee report. And at well over $40 million a year, from student fees to all sorts of institutional support, UConn athletics is the most highly subsidized program in the nation.
While this opinion likely will be pooh-poohed in Storrs, I would urge those in charge at UConn and the state capital to start making serious study of the matter. Millions and millions are at stake. The future of UConn athletics will be determined. Susan Herbst is leaving as president. Will Benedict still be here in 2023? I would like to see a small group of longstanding Connecticut stalwarts with a great love of the school formed to fully understand and help the public understand the best course for football heading into the next decade.
If the upcoming AAC television deal doesn’t provide adequate cover, if the team goes south in 2019, there will be more people inside the Silver Lane Plaza Shopping Center than Rentschler Field. Who is going to buy season tickets next year? Would you want to be Randy Edsall next spring on that coaching caravan?
When Edsall said last week, “I could care about how many we win or lose, I really could right now,” he opened himself to comparisons to Bob Diaco. This is Edsall. This isn’t Bobby Fishcakes. This is the adult brought in to replace the child.
“Everybody wants to sprinkle the fairy dust, wants to put it in the microwave for five seconds and think everything’s good,” Edsall said. “That isn’t what it’s all about in my book and if people don’t like it, tough (crap).
“This is probably a fiveyear process. I’m not crybabying.”
Nobody’s looking to sprinkle fairy dust. People see how many freshmen Edsall is playing. The remaining fans are just looking for progress and they don’t see it with embarrassing loss after embarrassing loss. You cannot blame them for feeling frustrated and humiliated.
Words about building culture and not caring about the W’s and L’s also can ring disingenuous when you weigh it against his bonuses of $10,000 for each win, $2,000 each for things like scoring first in a game and winning the turnover margin.
I asked Edsall on Sunday about saying he couldn’t care about wins and losses and then publicly leaning on his players for not playing every play like it was their last. To his credit, he said he knows the record is on him. He insists he wants to win as much as anyone. You see him arguing with officials, he said.
“If we don’t change the culture, if we don’t change work habits, the attitude, the commitment to preparation, we’ll have no chance to win,” Edsall said. “I want to win every darn game we play, but the wins and losses aren’t going to matter unless we get everything right.”
I asked him if there were ways for the media to measure culture change and not bemoan W’s and L’s during the rebuilding. He talked about a player showing up to practice without socks, making excuses and ending up pushing the sled at 6 a.m. He talked about another walking into a meeting, no food allowed, with an ice cream sundae.
Mao had his Cultural Revolution in China. RE2 has his Cultural Revolution in Storrs. He will make his team bigger, stronger, more disciplined with socks, inch by inch. That’s Randy Edsall, always has been. Can he still recruit enough quality to UConn in a 2019 AAC world? Will enough fans be patient to make the cultural revolution worth it? Or should UConn drop football, go hell’s bells with basketball and hockey and add lacrosse?
Tuesday is election day. Certainly fans would love to vote on who’s to blame for the colossal football mess. Hathaway? Pasqualoni? Diaco? Warde? Benedict? Edsall for leaving or coming back? Richard Blumenthal? The truth is the blame game isn’t saving anything. Is the UConn football program worth keeping alive? That’s what we need to find out, systematically, culturally, financially and without any fairy dust.