YanCon plays golf past the graveyard

Forget that the University of Maine football program traveled eight hours by bus last season for a game at Rutgers in order to save money and is chipping away the equivalent of two scholarships this year.

Never mind that UMass cut seven football scholarships earlier this year, causing head coach Jim Reid to quit, and the program is undergoing a two-year evaluation by the university hierarchy to determine whether it is feasible to continue it at its current fiscal level.

Things in the Yankee Conference are just great. Dandy, even.

They must be. How else to explain the nine- and soon to be 12-member conference holding its annual press day Monday at 9:30 a.m. in Ashland, Mass., a mere hop, skip, and shanked wedge from the Glen Ellen Country Club, where the league’s coaches and administrators (and any interested media) retired to play 18 holes of golf after sweating through those grueling, “So coach, how youse gonna be dis season?” questions?

Not that I have anything against a round of golf. But the logistics – early morning press conference, noon tee time (greens fee and cart cost $37) – meant that a significant number of those coaches (and athletic directors and sports information directors) in all likelihood traveled to the Boston area Sunday. They stayed in one of those cost-effective Boston area hotels where the danish cost $7.95, then had to spring for golf and probably a meal afterward before flying home to places like Richmond, Harrisburg, and Williamsburg, Va.

Hey, the recession must be over!

Except in Maine. I was told the Maine contingent did not partake in the fun and frivolity on the links. I had to be told this because the YC made its exercise in media relations just a bit too expensive for yours truly to justify on the ol’ BDN expense account.

According to UM SID Matt Bourque, who drove back to Orono after the press conference, Black Bear head coach Kirk Ferentz skipped the golf and went from answering questions directly to the New England Patriots camp to pick up a few pointers from Pats Coach Dick MacPherson. At least someone knew enough to kill two birds with one check.

Five or six years ago, in the go-go ’80s, I could understand the Yankee Conference doing something like this. Money flowed like Gatorade back then.

Trouble is, in most places in New England now, money flows like peanut butter.

What ticks me off is the blatant “to hell with appearances” attitude this press day exuded in the face of what looks to be an extremely serious point in the history of the Yankee Conference.

But maybe it’s just me who sees it that way.

According to new Yankee Conference commissioner Al Benson, with whom I talked late last week, the future of the Division I-AA league, “looks to be very strong, very solid.”

Really, Al?

Tell that to the New England-based, land-grant institutions. Beginning next year, they get to put their declining budgets up against two more wealthy institutions in YC newcomers James Madison and William & Mary. This after already fighting the bigger budgets and more rabid traditions of Villanova, Richmond, and Delaware.

From up here in Black Bear country, the future looks like a long, uphill battle just to stay respectable. That is, if the Yankee Conference survives in its expanded form.

There is some doubt about that last point. But don’t take my word for it.

“There is definitely a group of haves and have-nots,” is how Ferentz assesses the state of the conference. “I don’t know how some of us can expect to stay on a competitive level with the differences. We take a bus (to Rutgers). James Madison charters a plane on every trip. My No. 1 concern is, if the point ever comes (where Maine and any other NE land grants leave the YC), we move in one direction and don’t move separate from everyone else.”

That doesn’t sound very “solid” and “strong” to me.

Which makes Monday’s golf game look a lot like schmoozing past the graveyard.