Athletics Director Wood Selig and President Gary Ransdell appear to have reneged this month on their promise that the football team will not play more than one “guarantee game” per season.
Western is scheduled to play four guarantee games in the 2008-09 season, Selig said.
Such arrangements – in which elite teams offer six-figures to play lower-level teams such as Western – are common in the NCAA.
Selig said Tuesday that Western will play Virginia Tech and the University of Kentucky on back-to-back weeks this fall for a total of about $1.5 million.
Western will also face the University of Alabama for about $650,000, said Darrell Horn, associate athletics director of business affairs.
Selig said he considered the University of Indiana game – a home and home arrangement – to be a guarantee game too.
Indiana will pay Western $150,000 this season, Horn said.
Selig said in an interview on Jan. 28 that teams err in playing “three or four” guarantee games while they are transitioning into the Football Bowl Subdivision (FBS).
The games can cost bowl opportunities and lead to injuries for players, Selig said.
“Why do you want to put your kids in that position?” Selig said, a few days after telling the Board of Regents on Jan. 25 that Western would play only one guarantee game per year. “If you do it more, you have to ask ‘Why are we playing?’ I think it physically beats you down over time.”
But the odds of victory against such the elite teams are tall.
Selig said UK and Virginia Tech approached Western in the last month with openings in their schedules.
Elson and Selig approached Ransdell a few weeks ago to discuss contracts with the schools, Ransdell said.
Ransdell said he approved because of the flexibility in the schedule of a transitional year and the opportunities the games provide.
The games will bring fans, media attention and the “best competitive experience” for players, Selig said.
Ransdell said he wouldn’t have approved if Western was already part of the Sun Belt Conference, and thus bowl-eligible.
The Sun Belt allows two guarantee games per season.
Ransdell said he expects Western will honor the promise of one guarantee game per season after the 2008-09 season, “but that doesn’t mean we might not do a second in the future.”
Western nixed road games against Miami Ohio and Arkansas State, a future Sun Belt opponent, to play Virginia Tech and UK.
“‘08 could be the most challenging season we’ve ever had,” Selig said on Jan. 28.
Western has never played UK, a Southeastern Conference team.
Virginia Tech – an Atlantic Coast Conference team that was ranked ninth in the nation by the Associated Press last season and played in the Orange Bowl – is a “huge national profile,” Selig said.
Recognition brought by the games might lead to home-and-home game arrangements with other teams, Ransdell said.
The games mean opportunities for players to compete against premier programs in front of scouts, Elson said.
“It gives them a stronger resume when it comes to playing at the next level,” Elson said.
Selig calls guarantee games “national profile games.”
Dan Fulks, the director of Transylvania University’s accounting program and a finance researcher for the NCAA, said guarantee games have a different name for some in the athletics industry.
“We call those bodybag games,” Fulks said in October 2007. “The school comes out with half a million dollars and the players get beat up for it.”
Selig said on Tuesday that the move to FBS was researched and calculated.
Western didn’t research a link between injuries and increased competition, but such research is difficult, Selig said.
Elson said he would not have scheduled games if players couldn’t handle them. Selig agreed.
Selig denied the scheduling change had anything to do with university budget problems.
Money from guarantee games usually goes into the overall athletics budget.
“I have to worry about ‘Can I use that money to make our athletic department break even?’,” Selig said on Jan. 28.
The football team isn’t dependent on guarantee games to maintain its budget, Selig said. That is supposed to be helped through the additional $70 student athletic fee added with the division change.
Still, the goal is to extract the largest check possible for guarantee games, Selig said on Jan. 28.
The $1.5 million from Virginia Tech and UK will support the football program by funding final construction of Smith Stadium and replacement of the turf, which is about six years old, Selig said.
UK also gave Western 4,000 tickets to sell, which Western will only offer to season ticket holders as an incentive to buy season tickets.
Approval of the schedule, which includes four guarantee games, represents a change from what Ransdell told faculty and staff in September 2006, when Western was considering the move.
Western would steer away from the “get your brains beat out model,” used by MTSU and several other schools that scheduled multiple guarantee games in 2006, he said.
No empirical data links increased competition to increased injury rates.
However, several leading concussion researchers said that increased competition could explain the team’s increase in concussion diagnoses last season, the Herald reported on Nov. 2.
By Oct. 22, 2007, diagnosed concussions among football players tripled that of the previous season, rising from 4 to 12.
But there are many other variables that could explain such a spike, and it could have been a fluke.
Western hasn’t determined the cause of the spike in concussion diagnoses yet, Selig said Tuesday.
“We’re not dismissing it,” Selig said. “We’re taking it very seriously.”
Western hasn’t ruled out increased competition, Selig said Tuesday.
Selig said that the new field that will be paid for with the $1.5 million might curb the injuries.
Researchers agreed that turf might be a variable in the increase, but said it would be unlikely unless it had been replaced with a harder field.
Selig deferred questions posed on Jan. 28 about identifying a cause to Head Athletic Trainer Bill Edwards.
“I’m working on it,” Edwards said on Jan. 28. He declined to elaborate.
Edwards declined to discuss concussions on Wednesday.
But Edwards said he didn’t think the UK and Virginia Tech games bring more risk of injuries than Miami Ohio and Arkansas State.
“It’s I-A football, period,” Edwards said.
He declined further comment.
Selig said he thought more injuries come from games against weaker teams, like that last semester against West Virginia Tech, because Western players become less cautious.
There are fewer of those games now, as Western readies to face 10 FBS teams.
“All those people that didn’t like watching I-AA and didn’t like the teams playing – those days are over,” Selig said on Jan. 28. “Things are different at WKU.”
Reach Corey Paul at news@chherald.com.
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