Tears Of Unfathomable Sadness, Volume 22: UConn Is Basically Acknowledging Its FCS Status At This Point

It’s been over a year since our last Tears of Unfathomable Sadness. But we don’t want to get carried away — if we posted every little piece of schadenfreude, it would start to lose its effect.

But we figured this was a pretty good headline to pull us back into the fray:

UConn To Get $1.2 Million For 2021 Football Game At Clemson

Ohhhhh yeah. That’s the stuff.

The UConn football team will play at Clemson during the 2021 season and return to Connecticut with $1.2 million, the largest single-game guarantee in program history.

My very first reaction to this was “oh that’s cute, we play them every year.” My second reaction was that this is pretty great timing considering BC just announced its 1-and-1 scheduling arrangement with Michigan State three days ago.

It will surpass the $1.125 million the Huskies will earn for playing a "home" game against Boston College at Fenway Park in 2017.

The “quotes” around “home” are not my emphasis. I didn’t even realize UConn was getting a payday guarantee out of moving their BC home game to Boston. But it makes sense, and as those quotes make abundantly clear, everyone (including Mr. Anthony at the Courant) knows that this game at Fenway is going to be a UConn “home” game in name only with BC fans soundly outnumbering those coming up via I-84 and the Huskies hoping to just keep from getting embarrassed again.

Sorry, I got sidetracked with another piece of UConn sadness. Where were we?

Oh yeah. And this is really the meat of the schadenfreude casserole, isn’t it?

Expect UConn to schedule more games similar to this, replacing home-and-home series with Power Five teams ... with single road contests in exchange for a paycheck. Such games are crucial to UConn's operation, especially with Big East exit money set to dry up in about a year.

UConn is really taking its role as an FCS-level program seriously, huh? It’s not enough to get blasted 30-0 by BC, but they’ve moved on to fully acknowledging their doormat status by starting to regularly schedule payday games like your average FCS program trying to stay afloat financially.

And that’s pretty much exactly what the Huskies are doing. They don’t really have much of a choice. The American Athletic Conference TV deal is worth a laughable $2 million per team per year — a pittance compared to the money Boston College rakes in with the ACC (over $25 million per year).

UConn basketball is struggling, and even if it weren’t, hoops doesn’t pay the bills. As much as people aren’t happy with where BC football is, the Huskies are in an incomparably worse position, with fans advocating for either actually dropping down to FCS or for dropping the program entirely.

So in order to continue putting together 3-9 seasons for the pleasure of its alumni and state taxpayers, they’ve agreed to become a regular sacrifice for P5 teams for a paycheck without the return date at home for its fans. It’s a beautiful thing. And as always, it’s comforting to know that no matter how bad things might get here at Boston College, things will always be worse down in Storrs.