In being invited to the 2017 Armed Forces Bowl, San Diego State football will have to wrestle with California’s recently imposed travel ban.
Assembly Bill 1887, put into law on Jan. 1, 2018, prohibits state-funded travel to any state that has passed a law discriminating against gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender people.
On June 22, the attorney general added Texas to that list, meaning the SDSU Department of Athletics can’t use state funds to pay for expenses for the bowl, which takes place in Fort Worth, Texas.
Senior Associate Athletic Director of Business Administration Chuck Lang said the team will be using funds from the Campanile Foundation to pay for the travel expenses.
The foundation handles funds donated to the university.
Lang said the Mountain West Conference will reimburse the athletics department $776,600 for the bowl, which will go directly back to the Campanile Foundation.
The conference will pay SDSU $500,000 as a base refund, plus $200 per mile. Any money the conference has left over after the reimbursement expenses it will split evenly between the conferences.
They will use unrestricted donor funds if the travel costs total over $776,600. Lang said he did not have an estimate of what the total travel costs will be.
He said the department put this contingency plan in place earlier this season.
The same process was used for pre-scheduled games for the men’s and women’s soccer teams in Texas.
Lang said that the athletics department will no longer schedule games in those eight states, which also include Alabama, Kansas, Kentucky, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Dakota and Tennessee, but that it would revisit the idea in the future.
