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University of Hawaii athletics is at a critical juncture.

On the one side are big changes for UH: a new athletic director; a recently announced, $400 million stadium project, and an organization formed by business leaders to provide money to attract and keep players.

On the other side is a morphing landscape of shifting conferences, ballooning television deals and new rules that allow student athletes to be de facto professional free agents, transferring easily between schools and chasing endorsement opportunities — some as high as seven figures — known as name, image and likeness, or NIL, deals. 

All this is widening the chasm between elite programs and those like UH’s. The biggest college programs are self-sufficient business juggernauts. Their annual revenues routinely top $200 million.

These programs typically don’t need taxpayer support or mandatory student fees because they make so much from fans buying tickets and making donations, as well as enormous TV deals. High-rolling boosters and corporate sponsors widen the inequity, shelling out millions to pay the best players through organizations known as collectives.

By contrast, the small programs like UH eke out existences, usually relying on taxpayer money and mandatory student fees. The lack of a big football stadium has further hobbled UH.

While sports like basketball and baseball generate fan interest and revenue, the big money is in football, which can produce revenue to support smaller sports.

The question is whether Hawaii can maintain a significant athletic program in this landscape.

A new Aloha Stadium is just one element. Under college athletics’ current business model, fans also must vote with their dollars by buying tickets to fill the stadium and donating money to UH sports programs. Otherwise, the stadium could prove a bad bet: a public vanity investment that artificially sustains a football team that its fans won’t support.

“The UH is definitely at a crossroads for college athletics,” says Keith Amemiya, president of the Downtown Athletic Club of Hawaii, which recently announced it was setting up an organization to provide NIL deals to UH players.

Craig Angelos took over as UH athletic director in June. He’s since launched a program-wide analysis, known as “WWIT,” or What Will It Take. The initiative is trying to answer just that: What will it take for UH athletics to stay competitive or climb to the next level? Regardless of what UH decides to do, the analysis will allow for an informed decision, Angelos said.

“We’re trying to position ourselves so we at least know what the numbers are,” he said.

The Basic Math Of College Sports

College sports is an enormous business. The top five public university programs combined generated $1.1 billion in revenue in 2022, according to For the top program based on revenue, Ohio State University, that included $59.6 million in ticket sales and $63.6 million in contributions from individual fans, corporations, booster clubs and other donations.

Programs like Texas, Alabama, Michigan, Georgia and Louisiana State report similar numbers. With big bucks from fans, the programs generally are self-sufficient, typically relying on little or no money from the government or university, or student fees.

For Hawaii, by contrast, the biggest sources of revenue in 2022 were direct and indirect university support, including state funds, tuition, tuition waivers and the like. Those amounted to $27.7 million in 2022, more than half of UH’s $49.4 million revenue. Ticket sales accounted for just less than $2 million and contributions from fans, boosters and corporations about $4.5 million.

This points to a basic fact: Much of the program’s financial success depends on fans. 

“It does start with the fan base,” said Angelos. “They’re the ones who are purchasing tickets. They’re the ones who are buying merchandise. And they’re the ones who are making donations.”

For Hawaii, taxpayer support also is key: chiefly to support a proposal to replace crumbling Aloha Stadium, which will cost the public an estimated $400 million. With Aloha Stadium closed for safety reasons, UH’s football team has been playing at  in Manoa, a former practice field that’s been outfitted with bleachers to seat 15,000. 

Compare that to stadiums like , which can host more than 100,000 fans, Amemiya says. Even if UH fans did want to turn out and buy tickets in droves, Amemiya notes, there’s simply not enough space at Ching Field.

“Hawaii could sell out all of its home games, and that would equal just one Michigan home game,” he said.

But there’s more than fan support involved. Television broadcast contracts are perhaps more important, Angelos said. Avid national fan bases drive interest from television networks to cut deals with conferences like the Big 10 and SEC.

There’s such big money involved that the broadcast rights contracts have led to bizarre conference changes by teams seeking more loot. West Coast icons UCLA and USC, for instance, have migrated from the Pac-12 to the Midwest’s Big 10 for a more lucrative television deal. 

Oregon and Washington also have fled the Pac-12 for the Big 10, and Cal and Stanford have gone further east, to the Atlantic Coast Conference. In fact, so many teams announced they were leaving the Pac-12 that only Oregon State and Washington State remained, a situation that led the once-venerable conference to be jokingly called the “Pac-2.”

The reason for the shift is simple. USC and UCLA will get $80 million to $100 million annually for their share of the Big 10’s TV deal, . That compares to about $20 million under the old Pac-12 deal, Angelos said.

Schools like the SEC’s Vanderbilt share the bounty of big television deals, Angelos noted, raking in money from the television deals even though Vandy doesn’t have the fan base of SEC powerhouses like Alabama, Georgia, LSU or in-state rival Tennessee.

Honolulu Mayor Rick Blangiardi spent decades as a football coach and television executive before being elected to the city’s top job in 2020. He said the amount of money Big 10 schools are looking at in 2024 is stunning.

“Think about that,” the mayor said, noting that the previous $20 million was significant. “That’s grown by a multiple of five.”

Blangiardi said Hawaii and the Mountain West Conference of which it’s a member for football only can’t come close to that simply because there aren’t big television audiences in their home markets to drive advertising.

“It’s all in audience delivery,” Blangiardi said.

The result: Hawaii’s media rights were worth just $2.3 million in 2021, according to a report filed with the NCAA.

Given its challenges — “small stadium, small crowd, small money,” as Blangiardi put it — UH needs to start winning back audiences by broadcasting games for free instead of relying on pay-per-view subscriptions, the mayor said.

And UH needs to do what it can to fill Ching Field, he said. If the fan base is lagging, the mayor said, then UH needs to engage and strengthen it.

“Job 1: Fill up the place,” he said. “You need to win the audience.”

2024 Home Opener Vs. Oregon Is ‘In Doubt’

Conference realignment already is having an impact on UH football beyond revenue.

Hawaii is scheduled to host Oregon for its 2024 season opener Aug. 24. But Angelos noted the game was scheduled when it could have been played at the old, 50,000-seat Aloha Stadium. It was also before Oregon joined the Big 10, which means previously unplanned road games in the Midwest, including a Nov. 2 bout against Michigan in Ann Arbor. 

Hawaii’s game against Oregon is “in doubt right now because of this conference realignment,” Angelos said. 

It doesn’t help that Ching Field can seat only 15,000, which means a limited opportunity to make money through ticket sales, he added.

“That’s why we need to get back up to a full-size stadium,” he said.

With relatively little revenue from ticket sales, donations and television deals, the survival of UH athletics depends on public money, described in the chart above as “school funds.”

Finally there’s the challenge of recruiting athletes, who can now essentially be paid through NIL deals. 

When the  handed down its landmark decision NCAA v. Alston in June 2021, Amemiya says he quickly “knew it was going to be a game changer in college athletics.” 

Amemiya is the executive director of the Central Pacific Bank Foundation and former executive director of the Hawaii High School Athletic Association. So a month after the Supreme Court decision he helped forge Hawaii’s first NIL deal by signing UH quarterback Chevan Cordeiro, a St. Louis High School graduate, to help market the bank’s new digital checking account aimed at young adults.

But, in a sign of how hard it is for teams like UH to keep players, . He returned to Honolulu the next year to lead San Jose State to a 35-0 win over his former teammates. Such transfers are commonplace now as athletes chase NIL money against a backdrop of relaxed rules allowing transfers. 

“Every kid is an unrestricted free agent,” Blangiardi said.

Angelos said NIL and the transfer portal have had the biggest impact of anything he’s seen in his 35 years working in college sports.

“Those two things have just totally changed the landscape of college athletics,” Angelos said. “It started off innocently enough. But it’s quickly skipped to basically a pay-to-play model. People are now basically bidding for their services.”

He recalls a fellow athletic director quoting going rates for men’s basketball players at a school in a top-tier conference: the star player had a $300,000 NIL deal while the rest of the team had deals worth $110,000 to $130,000 a year. An elite quarterback for a top school can command seven figures, he said.

Technically the NIL deals are not done through the universities. Instead, private companies set them up directly with players. Or they’re set up by so-called “collectives,” private booster groups that fund NIL deals.

That’s what the Downtown Athletic Club announced in November. The Downtown Athletic Club collective will start small, supporting 25 UH football players and 11 women’s volleyball players. But Amemiya said the plan is to ramp up over time.

And the club certainly has the connections to do so. Its board of directors and advisory board include people like Amemiya; Duane Kurisu, chairman and chief executive of , which owns media entities like Honolulu Magazine and local sports radio stations; Hawaii Pacific Health president and chief executive Ray Vara; and Bank of Hawaii chairman and chief executive Peter Ho.

Corporate supporters include The Queen’s Health Systems and Servco Pacific.

Companies like Hawaii Pacific Health are also setting up their own NIL deals. But creating a collective to pool resources is essential if Hawaii wants to be competitive, says , the director of Washington University in St. Louis’ sports business program.

Hawaii might be late in doing so, Rishe said, but, “It’s better to do something than nothing.”

‘The Wild West’

The bigger question, Rishe said, is what if anything the NCAA or courts will do to regulate the world of NIL deals. The system is now opaque and vulnerable to corruption, he said, and some of the collectives “are renegades, not being above board.”

Angelos agreed, calling it “the Wild West.” Amemiya noted that people like the rapper Lil Wayne are stepping in as agents, seeking NIL deals for college athletes. In fact, NIL deals are so central to the business of college football these days that Lil Wayne opened the ESPN’s 2023 ESPY awards show singing, “I want my NIL so I’m going back to college.”

While the NIL deals are supposed to be compensation for services, there’s no way to know what services an athlete is providing besides playing a sport, Rishe said.

“What are you actually going to make the kid do?” he said.

In this context, landing top athletes becomes even more challenging. Hawaii high schools have produced no shortage of football stars in recent years. Manti Teo played linebacker at Punahou before becoming one of the most decorated players in college football history at Notre Dame. St. Louis alumnus Marcus Mariota won the Heisman Trophy while playing at Oregon. Tua Tagavailoa, another St. Louis graduate, led Alabama to a national championship as a freshman. He’s now one of the NFL’s top quarterbacks.

This year there’s Dillon Gabriel, a Mililani High School graduate, who transferred from Oklahoma to Oregon to replace the Ducks’ star quarterback and Heisman Trophy finalist Bo Nix. Gabriel’s already generating buzz .

Can Hawaii ever keep such star athletes home to play college football here?

“I’m an eternal optimist,” Amemiya says. “I can see a time when all of our best athletes decide to stay home and represent their state.”