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UCF AD Danny White on USFâs 2-for-1s against Gators, âCanes: âPrecedent I donât like being setâ | Commentary
Every time we hear coaches and administrators in the American Athletic Conference parrot the company line and call themselves a âPower 6â league, itâs difficult to control the urgâŠ
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Every time we hear coaches and administrators in the American Athletic Conference parrot the company line and call themselves a âPower 6â league, itâs difficult to control the urge to shake your head, roll your eyes and bust out laughing.
Itâs one thing to say youâre on an even playing field with the real big boys of college football; itâs quite another to act like it.
Case in point: USFâs 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.
âWe are excited to continue to add very high-level opponents with great national interest to our future football schedules,â USF athletics director Michael Kelly said in a news release earlier this week. âIn the next 10 years, we now have six games on the schedule against Florida (2022, â23 and â25) and Miami and our student-athletes, coaches and fans look forward to the challenge.â
If this is USFâs 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 âPower 6â program.
Right now, it seems, the only school in the American that is acting like a âPower 5â 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.
Donât get me wrong. As a football fan in Florida, I would love it if UCF acquiesced and took the Gatorsâ 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; weâre more like Florida State than we are Florida Atlantic; weâre more like Miami of Florida than we are Miami of Ohio.
Itâs still astounding to me that a Power 5 league hasnât jumped at the chance to expand and add UCF â a program that is thriving and growing faster than any in the country. We all know the demographics of UCF â 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 â 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. Thatâs 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.
Itâs no wonder White doesnât 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 UCFâs schedule this year and the Knights have future games scheduled with North Carolina, Louisville and Georgia Tech.
âGetting home-and-homes is getting increasingly harder, but we firmly believe that itâs the right move,â White said of his refusal to play two-for-ones. âFrom an equitable standpoint, I donât believe our student-athletes should have to take an inequitable series. Thatâs not fair to them. ⊠Weâre scheduling the way we schedule to build our season-ticket base and grow our revenue.â
Of course, it would help UCFâs cause if USF and other AAC programs would follow the Knightsâ lead and resist the urge to kowtow to the big boys. A perfect example of how USFâs 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, âTheyâd 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.â
Translation: If USF is going to accept UFâs 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 donât have an on-campus stadium and regularly play their games in front of tens of thousands of empty seats at the Tampa Bay Bucsâ 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 â where UF fans will have access to tens of thousands of tickets â is much more enticing than playing at UCFâs Spectrum Stadium, where the visiting team is given 3,000 tickets.
âIâm not going to criticize them [USF] because I donât know what Iâd do if I was in that chair,â White said of USFâs Kelly. â⊠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. Itâs probably not as much of a road game [for the Gators, 'Canes, etc.] as it would be at our stadium.â
At the same time, White said, âItâs a precedent I donât like being set in our conference for schools to start doing a much higher volume of two-for-ones. As a conference, weâve been successful historically getting home-and-homes with Power 6 opponents. Iâd like to see our conference peers continue to do that as we have done.â
In other words, if youâre going to call yourself a Power 6 league, then you need to start acting like it â both on the field and on the schedule.
