It's OK now to feel good _ much better, at least _ about the direction of UConn football, the pulse of which many considered to be the soft drumbeat of irrelevance last summer and in the time since.
The program was made to walk the plank, remember? That is what it may have looked like, anyway, when the university announced a return to the Big East in June 2019, energizing its basketball operations and leaving football to reinvent itself as an independent without opponents or a TV contract in place.
Fixing UConn football, in terms of performance and fiscal reality, remains a monumental task that will extend well into the future.
But there is some structure, some stability, from which to work.
Because the Huskies have five years of opponents lined up.
And because they have a TV contract, providing some needed financial lifeblood and the exposure required to be taken seriously.
UConn on Monday will announce an agreement with CBS Sports Network, which will carry four homes games in the upcoming 2020 season _ if there is one _ and every home game through 2023. The four-year deal comes with a pair of two-year network options that could push the agreement to eight years, through the 2027 season.
Dan Hurley doesn't have to be the only guy at UConn tweeting out celebratory clips of Rocky Balboa reaching the apex of that Russian mountain.
In the past 11 months, athletic director David Benedict has turned a decidedly complicated situation into one of possibility.
I remember Benedict at Madison Square Garden last summer following that Big East press conference, bristling at questions about football, scoffing at the slightest doubt and skepticism. I asked him, "Why so cranky?"
Because he was offended by any insinuation that moving to the Big East and out of the American Athletic Conference symbolized a death sentence for a football program already struggling so mightily.
"Obviously we had a lot to prove at that point in time, as to our ability to execute a plan and, yeah, we executed it," Benedict said this weekend. "There's no question it was a fair to say, 'How is this going to impact football?' The thing that was upsetting was that people had already made their decision as it relates to how it will impact football. We couldn't go out and do a lot of these things as we were working with the Big East, trying to make the transition in conferences. It just wasn't possible. It was necessary to have the time to work through this."
Then-UConn president Susan Herbst said that day in New York that UConn "couldn't keep being a feather in the wind of conference realignment," and that joining the Big East was "about taking some control of our own destiny as an athletic program."
And taking a chance, really, because while the Big East move was something to celebrate for all kinds of reasons that have to do with the past, present and future of basketball also left football as that feather, set to land flat on its face mask if Benedict couldn't get creative enough.
I understood the challenges. I even understood how someone could take a hard look at the situation and start typing the program's obituary. I also wrote that it wasn't necessarily wise to spray paint R.I.P. on the Huskies' new lockers at the Shenkman Training Center and I argued that football, with intriguing guarantee games and a regionalized schedule, could be interesting and workable.
Wasn't life in the AAC an unproductive snooze anyway? The Huskies weren't winning or drawing fans. And the bowl tie-in? Irrelevant unless you win, anyway. What's more attractive at Rentschler Field? A Syracuse or Army coming in for a non-conference game or an AAC game against a Tulane or East Carolina with fifth place on the line?
"I was extremely proud of figuring out the Big East transition (and) certainly a lot of our fans were excited about basketball," Benedict said. "But I didn't get to really enjoy that because I was immediately attacked about football. That wasn't a big shock to me, that people asked about football, but it didn't really allow me to step back and enjoy that because I knew I had my hands full with putting football in a position to be successful. I do feel like a burden is now lifted."
The three 2020 games not contracted by CBS Sports Network are expected to be televised, with SNY the likely landing spot.
CBS Sports Network has about 55 million subscribers.
Line that up with the ESPN+ reality (approximately 8 million subscribers) that UConn faced as a member of the AAC.
Financial specifics weren't available but the CBS deal, which is over seven figures for the four years, will benefit UConn in ways similar to the average of deals in place for teams in conferences such as Conference USA, the MAAC and Mountain West. Every FBS game UConn plays in the life of the deal will be on linear TV. There is a possibility that the one annual FCS game will be available on a digital-only platform.
UConn expects to know the start time for every game in advance of a season, and most will be in the noon-3:30 window on Saturdays, with the likelihood for one Friday night game a year. The UConn/CBS Sports Network deal was done through Learfield IMG College, which holds UConn's multimedia rights.
"All I can tell you is we're getting paid," Benedict said. "We are being compensated and they're obviously covering the costs of production."
Rentschler Field in coming years is going to be visited by all sorts of logos and uniforms familiar and appealing to UConn fans, the type of teams you hate to lose to and love to beat. Think BC, Pitt, Syracuse, UMass, Rutgers. Some are already on the schedules well into the future. UConn is in conversation with others.
That flexibility, with a focus on the Northeast, also means UConn will be taking more bus trips than usual for road games in years to come, an important cost-saving measure. And the guarantee games, which should bring in, on average, $1.5 million apiece are attractive: at Clemson in 2021, at Michigan in 2022, at Tennessee in 2023, at Ohio State in 2025, several more against prominent Power 5 opponents agreed upon but not yet under contract.
Now it's on Randy Edsall and his staff and his players, of course. The team is 6-30 since Edsall's return after the 2016 season, another couple of we're-still-so-young seasons in the book. The Huskies were 2-10 last year and Edsall has been afforded the time and patience to see his vision though.
We'll see if it works. We can watch it on TV.
"It was a big challenge but I never lost confidence because I believe in UConn's brand," Benedict said. "It's rewarding from the standpoint that I can go look at the guys on the football team and not have to be concerned about how they feel about what's going to happen moving forward."
