HARTFORD, Conn. _ In 2008, UConn and Tennessee signed a contract guaranteeing a home-and-home series between the two football programs for 2015 and 2016. Six years later, the two schools agreed to push back the games to an undisclosed date.
Now, UConn's Randy Edsall told The Courant on Monday, the Volunteers are attempting to get out of the contract altogether.
Edsall said athletic director David Benedict explained the situation to him recently and that the two agreed they should push Tennessee for at least a game in Knoxville, whether or not the Volunteers honor the home-and-home agreement.
"We feel, hey, we had a contract signed, we should be getting something out of that," Edsall said. "So we're just trying to do our due diligence for our program and trying to hold people accountable to something we had. Whether we can have it as a home-and-home, I don't know, but we're going to explore our possibilities to at least get something out of something that we had signed."
A representative from Tennessee told The Courant in an email, "We are currently in discussions with UConn." He declined to elaborate.
Though Edsall sounded resigned to giving up UConn's home game against Tennessee, he said he hoped the schools could agree to a so-called "guarantee game" in Knoxville. If that were to happen, Tennessee would pay UConn a negotiated figure, possibly above the $300,000 outlined in the original contract between the schools.
The original contract between UConn and Tennessee, obtained by The Courant through a Freedom of Information request, established that in the event of a breach of contract, the breaching party would pay $1 million to the other school. However, with the sides engaged in conversation, such a payout appears unlikely.
News of possible developments in the Tennessee-UConn series was first reported by Ed Daignault of the Republican-American on Twitter, earlier this week.
When the UConn-Tennessee contract was first signed, in February 2008, the Huskies were coming off a nine-win season that saw them climb as high as No. 16 in the AP Top 25. Since then, UConn has changed head coaches three times, moved from the Big East to the American Athletic Conference and endured a run of seven straight losing seasons. Those changes in circumstance likely make the Huskies a less appealing opponent for an SEC program such as Tennessee than they would have been a decade ago.
UConn has never played Tennessee in football but has faced the Vols periodically in other sports. The schools' women's basketball teams played annually for more than two decades before an acrimonious end to that arrangement in 2007.
