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The Spokesman-Review Newspaper
Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

If Trend Holds, Connecticut Boondoggle Is Doomed

Bill Wallace Bridge News

Take to the hills, you greedy sports owners, ambitious college pooh-bahs and, yes, earnest soccer moms. The voters spoke on the first Tuesday of November and you cannot like what they said.

In Pennsylvania, the voters rejected a proposed increase in the state sales tax in 11 southwestern counties that would have raised $700 million, with $400 million targeted for two new stadiums for the Pittsburgh Pirates and Steelers.

In Wisconsin, 70 percent of Minneapolis voters said yes, they want a voice in determining whether public funding - if more than $10 million - should go to sports projects like new stadiums for the Twins and Vikings. Projects of this sort now are subject to a citywide referendum.

A message of a similar kind was sent in the grass roots of northern New Jersey.

In the suburb of Hasbrouck Heights, a referendum asked if Woodland Park should be further developed - even if half the cost was met by private donations - for two new soccer fields that also could be used for football. “No,” said the citizens, 2-to-1.

If these three samples suggest a trend, then the director of athletics at the University of Connecticut, Lew Perkins, and the school’s trustees need be concerned.

The governor, John Rowland, has scheduled a special session of the legislature for Nov. 24 to approve state funding of a new football stadium for the state university at Storrs. The cost, to be paid through bonding, would be $107 million.

A 35,000-seat stadium would enable the university to qualify for a football membership in the Big East Conference, thus upgrading from Division I-AA to Division I-A.

UConn already is a basketball member of the Big East - and a most successful one, both on the floor and at the box office. Basketball is not football, however, and the projections proffered by Perkins to the legislators are cloudy ones.

His sources were Roy F. Kramer, commissioner of the Southeastern Conference, based in Birmingham, Ala., and the accounting firm of KPMG Peat Marwick.

The trouble with this kind of advice is that it usually favors the goals of those seeking it. The trustees, who voted 17-1 for the proposal to boost football, might have mistaken Alabama for Connecticut.

The president of the university, Philip E. Austin, is meekly going along with the foolishness.

UConn will be ready for big-time football in 1999 and will lose as much as $4 million annually at the start, said the report. “After five or six years, we believe we’d show a profit,” Austin has said.

Not unless television disappears.

On Saturday afternoons, more than a dozen college football games can be seen on television in the state, games often involving top-10 teams highly promoted by the networks.

College football attendance in the Northeast has been decimated by television over the past two decades, most notably on inclement weather Saturdays.

UConn has rarely filled its present stadium, which seats 15,600, and the university lacks a base of established fans who would buy 20,000 season tickets.

Can it create such a base? Not easily.

This new stadium, to be built in a cornfield next to a two-lane state highway, is about halfway between Boston and New York. It is thus well situated from a transportation standpoint - but not from a television one, not with all those channels available at a click.

Perkins is using various tactics to sell this project.

He paints dire scenarios, one of which is that UConn might be kicked out of the Big East if it doesn’t embrace the conference’s deadline invitation to join its eight football members. The basketball faithful don’t want that.

However, another basketball member, Villanova, just declined a similar invitation to upgrade its football program from the Division I-AA Atlantic 10 Conference.

Other Big East basketball members, Georgetown and St. John’s, have I-AA football teams, while Providence and Seton Hall don’t play football.

Boston University, with UConn a member of the Atlantic 10, is giving up football after this season and will put $800,000 thus saved into other sports.

Perkins says Connecticut’s football losses are $2.4 million a year - a most generous number. Could it have been inflated by counting 63 football scholarships at full tuition rates?

Whatever the answer, this state university proposes to spend more money - on a stadium, on more scholarships, on the additional coaches required of I-A programs - so it can lose more money.

Although Gov. Rowland, a Republican, was elected on a cut-spending platform, he is all for this scheme. He might have to stand on his head, however, to sell it to the legislators, who in turn must answer to the voters.

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