Long since time to shut down this farce

fumble!

The U Conn Agricultural Sheep Shaggers’ record stretched to 0-11 Saturday, enabling UMass to break its own 16-game losing streak. UConn’s record since 2018: 3 — 25. Sports reporters are unimpressed.

It was has been a season of losses and chaos, a fall when the UConn football program has become a national punchline.

How low can they go? How about this: The Huskies’ 11th consecutive loss ended a 16-game losing streak for neighboring UMass, perhaps the only program in America ridiculed more than UConn.

This article sums it up: From Darlings to Joke What Happened to UConn Football?

How did a program with conference championship trophies inside a $57.9 million football complex fall so hard and so fast that they're now celebrating two touchdowns? How did a meteoric rise in the 2000s not lead UConn to become one of the small-school elites in college football? Why is UConn, now 9-43 since 2016, arguably the worst FBS program of the last five years?

How did this happen?

"I have a hard time believing it's a complete dearth of talent," said Daniel Connolly, a reporter covering UConn for SBNation.

[I]t's complicated. …..

Meanwhile, the football program is responsible for 34.4% of the athletic department’s $43.3 million shortfall in the 2020 fiscal year, according to financial documents UConn filed to the NCAA. The department is also heavily subsidized by the university and student fees. Athletics received $43.9 million in subsidies in 2018-19, the second-highest total in the nation, according to USA Today.

To better understand UConn, it might be best to look at its fast rise in football and its drive to fund the program in an arm's race that involved an inner-circle competition among high-profile boosters trying to one-up each other in the early 2000s.

And so on. Bottom line, UConn football loses tens of millions of dollars a year playing execrable football in a huge, empty stadium in East Hartford that was paid for by you and me. The students won’t leave campus to attend, and has become obvious, no one else in the state can think of any reason to travel to East Hartford at all, let alone to watch a gaggle of teenaged-boys play football at a sub-high school level of competence. Even the prospect of watching a losing coach collect a $1.26 million salary at taxpayers’ expense can’t seem to draw a crowd.

What little revenue the program does generate comes from serving as a sacrificial lamb for better teams: those programs pay UConn appearance fees as high as $1.5 million to show up and be thrashed and humiliated — the winners pad their resumes to impress bowl conference voters, and UConn goes home. Which might be an acceptable exchange if the “earnings” contributed to the school’s overall athletic budget (God forbid any were diverted to academic purposes), but they don’t. Football sucks the funds dry, and returns for more.

Long ago, in a more bucolic time, UConn Ag boys would clear a cow pasture of its denizens on a Saturday morning and play a little ball. Their fellow students would gather to watch, entertaining themselves by tossing cow pies at each other, the players, and the referee, who also served as the school’s president and sold lemonade in the stands during halftime. The only expense was the cost of the ingredients for the lemonade the president’s wife made up in her kitchen on game days, and that was usually recouped in sales.

So where do we go from here? Well, the pastures are still there, the players remain as good-spirited and clueless as back then, the president seems to have nothing better to do on Saturdays and should be available to ref. Put him to work, fire the coach, convert the East Hartford stadium to a homeless shelter, and bring the boys back on the farm. Saving to taxpayers: $45 million. Loss to the great sport of football: zero.

Pratt & Whitney Stadium: what if they held a football game, and nobody gave a fu*k?