By Ferd Lewis
Advertiser Columnist

How much would an invitation to join the Mountain West Conference — if one is forthcoming — be worth to the University of Hawai'i?

An arm and a leg? Or, just one limb?

Can they afford it — or afford not to?

Those are the kinds of questions the Rainbows have to be pondering these days. Or, at least ones they should be asking themselves while they wait.

Even if the Mountain West gets around to extending an invitation this summer — and, it is still speculation — do not expect it to come cheap. Where conference marriages are concerned, there's always a dowry involved.

Remember, these are the folks who clandestinely deserted UH, among others, over money. It was, as they maintained back in 1998, nothing personal, just business.

So, rejoining them would be about business, too. The business of showing the Mountain West the money. What UH might be able to bring to a conference in terms of prestige, competitive teams, television market, etc., is only part of the equation. There is also the matter of a cover charge and, possibly, a travel subsidy. Serious coin, indeed.

Consider, for example, that when the two latest members of the Western Athletic Conference, Boise State and Louisiana Tech, joined the party last summer they reportedly made a cash payment and agreed to forego shared conference revenue for the first couple years.

A Mountain West athletic director said any school that receives an invitation will have to ante up. "Regardless of who it might be, there would be some buy-in expense. There has to be some purchase of equity," the A.D. said.

The eight schools that broke away from the WAC each put $800,000 into the pot from the start. Since then, they've signed a seven-year, $48 million ESPN-ABC television deal and secured three bowl games, raising the value. How much they might share is the big question.

And then there is the matter of a travel subsidy. UH paid one as a condition of membership when it joined the WAC in 1979 and continued to pay, as much as $250,000 annually, for 17 years. That was for men's sports only since the Wahine sports were in the Big West. Only when the WAC expanded to 16 schools in 1996 was the subsidy waived, becoming a bone of contention during the breakup.

The problems "a lot of people had with Hawai'i were that when the subsidies were cut out, it became a very expensive situation (to keep UH)," New Mexico A.D. Rudy Davalos said at the time.

In an effort to get picked up by the Mountain West in 1998, UH reportedly offered a $500,000 travel subsidy without success.

Four years later, it remains to be seen what the price tag might look like now and how much of a "deal" it would really be.