Let UConn football be bad
It’s been quite a comedown for the New York Times college football national champion of 2020.
Driven by COVID restrictions, UConn didn’t play football last year, and given that it doesn’t have a conference to play in and that no one pays much attention anyway, hardly anyone noticed. A New York Times columnist, though, declared UConn the sport’s “real champion”: the school was “the first ... team to squarely face the coronavirus and decide against playing a single snap during a raging pandemic,” Kurt Streeter wrote.
It was a nice sentiment. Surely the world didn’t lose out on much by a lack of UConn football games in 2020.
Now back in action in 2021 — not that the pandemic has faded — UConn has picked up where it left off by thoroughly embarrassing itself, losing 45-0 to an atbest mildly competitive top-level team, and then losing again to a lower-shelf team, Holy Cross. Considering who UConn has left on the schedule, including perennial national contender Clemson, the chances of anything positive coming out of this season already look remote.
As such, few were surprised when head coach Randy Edsall announced after the Holy Cross debacle his intention to retire at the end of the season. It was slightly more surprising when the school announced the next day that Edsall would instead be leaving immediately. The team is yet again looking for a fresh start.
Which is fine. Even good teams go through bad stretches, and UConn is far from good.
Except that this is UConn, and so it’s not fine. Instead, UConn’s continuing struggles have once again turned the football team’s status into an existential question. Its reason to continue existing at this level has been brought into question, as it has many times before, with some observers saying the school should move down a level or give up the sport altogether.
CT-Insider writers Mike Anthony and Paul Doyle covered every angle of this question in a recent story, looking at the history, the money and the future possibilities, all of which play a role in any decision UConn might make. With all the facts at play, it’s hard to understand why UConn can’t just be bad at football. Of course it should try to get better, but a losing team at this stage is not a reason to do away with the endeavor altogether.
There is a lot of money involved, including subsidies from student funds. The athletic department runs a deficit, and football is a big reason why. But as Anthony and Doyle demonstrate, moving down a level or eliminating the sport doesn’t make those problems go away, and could make them worse.
From a public policy standpoint, the issue of big-time college sports always leads to uncomfortable questions. It’s natural to ask if filling stadiums and paying coaches millions of dollars is really the best course of action for a public university. Still, whether football exists or not, UConn is firmly in this business one way or another via its top-level basketball teams. It’s not a system anyone would have designed, but it’s the one we have.
And speaking of basketball, it’s worth pointing out that most of the schools best known for that sport have relatively anonymous football programs. Think of Kansas, Duke, Kentucky and Indiana and you don’t connect them with gridiron excellence, even if their teams make a run every now and then. Ultimately, that’s probably the most that can be expected of UConn — general mediocrity and a decent team every so often.
What’s easy to lose now is how recently that happened. UConn football was good, in the not-so-distant past. Edsall, the recently departed coach who is leaving the team at its worst, in his first stint with the team led the school to now-unimaginable heights, including a top-25 ranking, a packed stadium and even a New Year’s Day game alongside the sport’s top programs. It’s been a long slide since then, but the team has proven capable of reaching great heights.
It won’t be there again for a long time. Maybe it will never happen. But for the foreseeable future, continuing to try to regain that status remains the school’s best option. Mediocrity would be about 10 steps up from its current position, but what’s left of the fan base would take that in a second.
UConn football isn’t going away. Just let the team be bad without questioning its existence.