With Fordham bowing out of its Sept. 12 game, one shoe has dropped and, now, the University of Hawaii football team waits to see if there might be more in this COVID-19 tossed season.
On Monday, the first day the Rainbow Warriors were allowed to open organized workouts under NCAA policy, the Rams made public their decision to cancel the nonconference game at Aloha Stadium.
Not since 1941, when a scheduled Dec. 13 game between UH and San Jose State was scrapped following the attack on Pearl Harbor, has one of the Rainbow Warriors’ games been canceled closer to the planned kickoff.
While UH seeks an 11th-hour replacement for Fordham, there is also growing concern about the status of its scheduled Aug. 28 opener at Arizona in Tucson, a state where the virus is spiking.
The UH-Fordham game, which was announced in 2015, was dropped by the Rams along with their Aug. 29 Stony Brook and Sept. 5 Bryant games.
The Rams and Patriot League are expected to decide this week whether they will play in the fall at all or move their games to the spring. They are expected to take their cue from the Ivy League, which is scheduled to announce its plans Wednesday.
Fordham is a football-only member of the Patriot League, whose Council of Presidents announced on June 22 a guidance plan for fall competition. Key provisions of that plan mandated that, “No Patriot League teams will fly to competitions and, with rare exceptions, regular season competition will exclude overnight travel.”
The Rams, whose campus is in New York City, had been scheduled to fly from Newark, N.J., to Honolulu.
Patriot League members Colgate and Lafayette have also recently canceled games. Colgate, rather than endure a 9-hour, 590-mile trip to Kalamazoo, Mich., dropped its game at Western Michigan. Lafayette canceled its Sept. 12 game at Navy. WMU added Stony Brook as a replacement.
A Navy spokesman said he was not aware of any discussions about UH playing the Midshipmen.
UH and Fordham were said to still be working out the financial details of the cancellation. The deal that UH typically offers Football Bowl Subdivision members such as Fordham usually calls for the Rainbow Warriors to provide airfare, hotels and transfers for the visitors plus cash but requires the visitor to pay for any change or cancellation charges incurred.
A home game against an FCS foe can net UH $400,000-$500,000 in direct revenue. But most of that was with fans in attendance and, at this point, it was unsure whether the game would have been played with people in the stands. Indirect revenue, including TV and marketing, would add more.
Likewise, Aloha Stadium’s estimated gross revenue average per game with fans on hand in 2019 was $135,000, not counting parking expenses, stadium manager Scott Chan said.