UConn trying to fix its athletics mess

Only a few months into his tenure as president of the University of Connecticut, Thomas C. Katsouleas told me recently he believes there’s a future for UConn in top-level college football. As the losing continues and red ink grows, there are fewer people all the time who agree with him.

It wasn’t long ago that UConn football was on the upswing. A Twitter feed called Husky Highlights features sports clips from the recent past, and for a UConn fan it offers a welcome break from an otherwise depressing news feed.

One day there’s a clip with the UConn women dismantling another opponent by 30 points. There’s former men’s star Caron Butler with a fallingout-of-bounds behind-the-back pass to a teammate for an open layup.

And mixed in with the basketball, like transmissions from another dimension, are occasional clips of football excellence, from the not-so-distant past when UConn fielded a competitive, improving team.

Here’s UConn winning a bowl game. There’s one where UConn football is ranked No. 13 in the nation as it demolishes Rutgers. There’s another where UConn is wrapping up a big win at home over Baylor, led by quarterback Robert Griffin III — you know, the Heisman Trophy winner and future NFL Rookie of the Year? UConn beat that guy. The football team.

These things really happened. UConn football never reached basketball-like heights and likely never will, but there was a stretch where it was relevant and exciting. And all that seems like a long time ago.

UConn football today is terrible beyond words. The team struggles against lower-level competition, and rarely puts up a fight otherwise. This has interest beyond sports fans as UConn athletics continues to sink deeper into deficit, with shortfalls topping $40 million each of the past three years. Student fees are helping fill the gaps, and with major tuition hikes in store, it could be hard to sell prospective students and their parents on paying extra to subsidize a team that has gone 3-21 over the past two seasons.

Football is not the only UConn sport to run a deficit, though its numbers are the worst at the school, with $3.3 million in revenue and $16.6 million in expenses. Even women’s basketball is in the red, with $4.5 million coming in vs. $8 million going out. The women’s team is also in the midst of maybe the greatest run in the history of American team sports, having not lost consecutive games since 1993 while racking up 11 national championships in that span. So there won’t be many complaints on that score.

The source of all this money loss is more than bad football, though that hasn’t helped. No top sports school in America has been hurt more than UConn by conference realignment, where schools tossed aside old rivalries in search of more dollars and those left behind found themselves in even worse shape.

UConn was, until this past summer, a bystander. Despite some misunderstandings, UConn never left the Big

East, its home since the early ’80s. After watching the league slowly dissolve over the years, seven members, all smaller non-football-playing schools, decided in 2013 to head off on their own. They paid the remaining schools, including UConn, millions of dollars to take the name of the conference with them, and the new Big East was born.

This is what UConn will be joining, or rejoining, this summer, in its first proactive move to fight ongoing athletic deterioration. It should help cut down on travel expenses and regrow fan interest. (Katsouleas, in the same interview where he said UConn football had a future, said one of the top requests from students on taking his new job was “Get UConn back in the Big East.”)

But none of that solves football, which will be without a conference altogether. Life as an independent will likely be a step up from regular road trips to Houston and Orlando. But if the finances don’t stabilize as the school insists they will, and if there’s no hope of a competitive football product, the school shouldn’t be averse to cutting its losses.

It’s not like its history of top-level football goes back a long way; it was only this century that UConn ascended to its current status. And in terms of attracting fan interest, any school in the Northeast, Connecticut included, is going to be playing catch-up.

Katsouleas is six months into his job, and he can give the new conference situation time to settle. But the state needs to see some improvement, on the field and off.