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UCF AD Danny White on USF’s 2-for-1s against Gators, ‘Canes: ‘Precedent I don’t like being set’ | Commentary
Every time we hear coaches and administrators in the American Athletic Conference parrot the company line and call themselves a “Power 6” league, it’s difficult to control the urg…
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Every time we hear coaches and administrators in the American Athletic Conference parrot the company line and call themselves a “Power 6” league, it’s difficult to control the urge to shake your head, roll your eyes and bust out laughing.
It’s one thing to say you’re on an even playing field with the real big boys of college football; it’s quite another to act like it.
Case in point: USF’s football-scheduling announcement earlier this week in which the Bulls revealed they would be playing a future two-for-one series against Miami. This comes in the wake of an earlier announcement in which the Bulls agreed to play a future two-for-one against Florida.
What this means is the Gators and the Hurricanes will get two revenue-producing home games while USF gets only one home game.
“We are excited to continue to add very high-level opponents with great national interest to our future football schedules,” USF athletics director Michael Kelly said in a news release earlier this week. “In the next 10 years, we now have six games on the schedule against Florida (2022, ’23 and ’25) and Miami and our student-athletes, coaches and fans look forward to the challenge.”
If this is USF’s scheduling philosophy, then so be it; to each his own. If the Bulls feel that bending over backward and giving the Gators and the 'Canes a competitive advantage just to get them on the schedule is the best way to proceed, then that is their business. However, this should preclude USF from referring to itself as a “Power 6” program.
Right now, it seems, the only school in the American that is acting like a “Power 5” program is UCF, which not only has gone toe-to-toe with the big boys on the field but has steadfastly refused to roll over and schedule two-for-ones. Symbolically, competitively and financially, UCF athletics director Danny White believes it makes the Knights seem small-time to bow down and kiss the feet of Florida, Florida State and Miami.
Don’t get me wrong. As a football fan in Florida, I would love it if UCF acquiesced and took the Gators’ recent two-for-one offer. I think a series between the Gators and the Knights would be a blast and create immense interest both regionally and nationally. That said, I absolutely love White sending a message to Power 5 teams that we are one of you; we’re more like Florida State than we are Florida Atlantic; we’re more like Miami of Florida than we are Miami of Ohio.
It’s still astounding to me that a Power 5 league hasn’t jumped at the chance to expand and add UCF — a program that is thriving and growing faster than any in the country. We all know the demographics of UCF — the second-largest university in the nation with an enrollment of nearly 70,000 students located in the biggest TV market in the country without an NFL team.
The Knights are just 500 short of selling out their allotment of 27,000 season tickets — which is about double their season-ticket base from just three years ago. If you add 13,000 student tickets and 3,000-4,000 tickets for visiting teams and walk-up sales, the math says that the Knights may soon outgrow 45,000-seat Spectrum Stadium. That’s right; in a day and age when college football attendance is shrinking and many teams wish they could decrease the size of their stadiums, UCF attendance is actually increasing and the Knights are talking about expanding their stadium.
It’s no wonder White doesn’t want to schedule two-for-ones and give up a home game and the $3 million in revenue that comes with it. Unlike SEC teams that each get a $45 million check every year from their massive TV deal, UCF gets a fraction of that and desperately needs the revenue-producing home games to balance its budget.
This is why White has rejected two-for-ones with the Gators and Miami in favor of Power 5 teams that will schedule home-and-homes with UCF.
Stanford and Pitt are on UCF’s schedule this year and the Knights have future games scheduled with North Carolina, Louisville and Georgia Tech.
“Getting home-and-homes is getting increasingly harder, but we firmly believe that it’s the right move,” White said of his refusal to play two-for-ones. “From an equitable standpoint, I don’t believe our student-athletes should have to take an inequitable series. That’s not fair to them. … We’re scheduling the way we schedule to build our season-ticket base and grow our revenue.”
Of course, it would help UCF’s cause if USF and other AAC programs would follow the Knights’ lead and resist the urge to kowtow to the big boys. A perfect example of how USF’s scheduling philosophy harms UCF came Thursday when Gators coach Dan Mullen spoke to the Central Florida Gator Club and was asked about a potential rivalry against the Knights.
Mullen chuckled and replied, “They’d have to play us to have a rivalry. We made an offer to play them [UCF] and we made a similar offer to USF, who is in their league.”
Translation: If USF is going to accept UF’s take-it-or-leave-it two-for-one deal, then so should UCF.
White stops short of blaming USF and even says he understands why the Bulls would schedule the series. Unlike UCF, the Bulls don’t have an on-campus stadium and regularly play their games in front of tens of thousands of empty seats at the Tampa Bay Bucs’ Raymond James Stadium (capacity 65,890).
For USF, one home game against the Gators at RayJay will fill every seat and probably more than double the revenue of a normal home game against, say, Tulane. For the Gators, playing USF at RayJay — where UF fans will have access to tens of thousands of tickets — is much more enticing than playing at UCF’s Spectrum Stadium, where the visiting team is given 3,000 tickets.
“I’m not going to criticize them [USF] because I don’t know what I’d do if I was in that chair,” White said of USF’s Kelly. “… They have a different set of circumstances than we do. They play in a big NFL stadium, which provides a different dynamic for the [Power 5] schools that will go in and play there. It’s probably not as much of a road game [for the Gators, 'Canes, etc.] as it would be at our stadium.”
At the same time, White said, “It’s a precedent I don’t like being set in our conference for schools to start doing a much higher volume of two-for-ones. As a conference, we’ve been successful historically getting home-and-homes with Power 6 opponents. I’d like to see our conference peers continue to do that as we have done.”
In other words, if you’re going to call yourself a Power 6 league, then you need to start acting like it — both on the field and on the schedule.
