Friday night slights: Home hotels exacerbating extravagance

Hate Mail: Let's go crazy

If it's Friday night in Gainesville and the Florida Gators are playing a football game the next day at The Swamp, Tim Tebow deserves a hotel room. How could he sleep in his apartment? He could not. He deserves a hotel room, and dammit, the University of Florida will spend the money to get him -- and his teammates, at a cost of roughly $40,000 for the season -- that room.

And it's the same thing at Oklahoma with Sam Bradford. And at North Carolina State with, um, whoever plays quarterback for North Carolina State. And at Tennessee and Oregon and Purdue and South Carolina and just about everywhere college football is played at the BCS level.

Tom O'Brien's Wolfpack spent over $80,000 on hotels for home games in 2008. (US Presswire)

Players need a hotel room on Friday night.

Even before home games.

And it's insulting. It's insulting to you, the reader, knowing that the N.C. State football team paid more to put up the Wolfpack at a hotel before home games -- almost $86,000 for a handful of Friday nights -- than you'll earn in six months or a year or maybe two or three years. They're throwing away money, and while that money wasn't going to come your way, it's an insult nonetheless.

It's insulting to the players themselves, because they're being told that -- even though they're legally adults and usually 20 years old or older -- they cannot be trusted on their own to get enough sleep or even to stay out of jail the Friday night before a football game. After high school graduation they can be trusted by their parents to leave the confines of home, wherever home was, and report to a college campus where they will be on their own for large parts of every day. But they cannot be trusted by their football coach to show some sense on Friday night in their adopted college hometown.

And maybe some college football players can't be trusted on those six or seven fall Friday nights every year. Maybe lots of them wouldn't get enough sleep and maybe some of them wouldn't stay out of jail if they were allowed to take their athletic arrogance and machismo posturing out into the real world so shortly before a football game.

And maybe that last notion, as realistic as it is, is an insult to me.

Because years ago as a teenager I would have loved to be that college kid who was so good at a sport that my tuition and room and board were free. I would have loved to have been 6-feet-3, 225 pounds and strong or fast or skilled or even all three. I would have loved to play six or seven college football games every year in front of my fellow students and 80,000 fans who would adore me simply because of the helmet on my head and the jersey on my back. I would have loved it.

And I wouldn't have screwed it up by staying out late Friday night. Because I'm that smart? No.

Because I'm not an absolute moron.

That's all it takes for a college football player to stay out of trouble the Friday night before a home game: Don't be an absolute moron.

The price tag for saving college football players from their absolute-moron-selves is in the $50,000 range per year, though the fiscal geniuses at N.C. State have found a way to spend close to double that in Raleigh.

It's financial insanity, but the Pac-10 is here to help. The Pac-10, bless its stingy little heart, has proposed legislation that would stop schools from putting their football team in a hotel the night before a home game. The NCAA's Division I legislative council will vote on the proposal in January. The proposal is so sensible, so obvious, that it's brilliant.

And of course other coaches in other conferences are furious.

Purdue's Danny Hope and Indiana's Bill Lynch are on record as saying they're against the Pac-10 proposal. So are most of the coaches in the ACC, although Florida State's Bobby Bowden is not. And good for him.

In Gainesville, meanwhile, the Gators are so enamored with their Friday night splurge that they're selling it to boosters. Which makes sense, in a perverted way. What better way to pay for such a ridiculous budget item than to have a ridiculous booster pay the bill? For a mere $5 million, a booster (and a guest!) can eat meals with the team and walk to the stadium with the team and, best of all, spend Friday night at "the team hotel to rest up for game day."

Sounds distracting to me, honestly. Put up the players in a hotel to get them away from distractions, but then let some jock-sniffing booster hang out with them at the team hotel. But for $5 million, distract away. Right?

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Meanwhile on planet Earth, this whole thing is offensive. Football is the biggest cash cow on a college campus, but that doesn't mean it should arrogantly spray its milk all over the floor. The average Division I athletic department lost $5.7 million in 2007, and that was before the economy went in the toilet. Speaking of which, new Stanford coach Jim Harbaugh tinkles in a private bathroom that cost about $60,000, donated by booster John Arrillaga. So schools are literally urinating money down the toilet.

East Carolina's chancellor, Steve Ballard, issued a web statement to the masses about the school's financial woes. The title was "ECU's budget picture," and Ballard's statement began like this:

"The budget picture is bleak ..."

He predicted "dramatic cutbacks that will affect every aspect of our mission" as he projected the school's potential budget shortage at being close to $60 million. But still the ECU football team has been spending tens of thousands of dollars to spend the Friday night before home games in a local hotel. Why? Because the ECU football coach has apparently convinced the ECU chancellor that, without the night in the hotel room, his players might morph into absolute morons.

At Wisconsin, they don't have a Division I baseball team. Too expensive. The baseball Badgers were eliminated in 1991, but the football Badgers spend Friday nights before home games in a hotel. And at Clemson, according to The Charlotte Observer, the school paid almost $50,000 in 2008 for the bus ride from the hotel to the stadium. The hotel cost was extra.

Nauseating, from top to bottom. Players can't be trusted on their own. Coaches are acknowledging they can't control them. Athletics directors approve the expenditure. Presidents let the whole thing happen.

And we wonder why college football is so screwed up? Not me. Stupid is as stupid does, and the Friday night hotel is the stupidest waste of money in college sports. After Harbaugh's freaking toilet.