In for a dime, in for a dollar—or, as University of Houston would have it, in for $1 million, in for $4 million-plus. This was reportedly the salary UH offered to Tom Herman to remain as the university's football coach. While it was a hard offer to turn down, University of Texas offered an even more splendid package: Earlier this week, Coach Herman announced that he had accepted the Longhorns' invitation to become their new football coach.

This turn of events, greeted with tears and fears in Houston, was both predictable and lamentable. It was predictable because the ironclad logic of collegiate football made it impossible to keep Herman at UH.

With two stunningly successful seasons to his credit, including a Peach Bowl victory last year against Florida State, Herman entertained ambitions UH could not meet. These ambitions centered on joining a major conference and all such a move entails: big stadiums, big bowl games, big profits, and big cable contracts.

Despite the repeated pushes made by President Renu Khator and Board of Regents chairman Tilman Fertitta, however, the so-called Big Five conferences did not budge. Unable to find a hole through his opponents' lines, Coach Herman decided to join them.

During his short stay at UH, Tom Herman showed himself to be not just a motivator, but also a mensch whose habit of kissing players on the cheeks made national news. We wish him well. But should we also wish our administration well in its stubborn efforts to transform UH into a national football power?

This is where events turn to the lamentable, offering a cautionary tale. The siren call of Power 5 football has driven yet another university onto the rocks.

Last year, flush with excitement from UH's Peach Bowl victory, President Khator exulted: "We are finally nationally relevant." But that was then. Now, however, we are again irrelevant.

Having lost three conference games, the Houston Cougars will be not just shut out from a major bowl, but they have been shut down in their own provincial conference, the AAC. The ripples are already being felt, with promising high school recruits who had committed to Herman now de-committing. A cornerback from California, the aptly named Javelin Guidry, informed UH that because of "recent coaching changes and uncertainty of program," he decided to go elsewhere.

Unlike Javelin Guidry and Tom Herman, most UH students cannot go elsewhere. Nearly two-thirds come from the greater Houston area, while more than three-quarters commute to campus. They attend UH not because of our spanking new stadium, whose original price tag has risen from $108 million to $128 million.

(Whether or not they attend the games, our students will, for generations to come, help fund them through a $45-per-semester fee. The rest of the money was funded through revenue bonds. The gamble, of course, is that the borrower expects to pay for the bonds with revenue generated by a successful football program.)

Instead, students come to UH for an education. Khator has overseen a building boom on campus—the number of dormitory rooms has more than doubled under her presidency—and she has offered plum posts to nationally recognized researchers. Yet this is not reason to uncork champagne and toss confetti.

While the university's retention rate has improved, this is in part because we had been down for so long that everything looks up. Only 46 percent of UH students graduate within six years. For UT-Austin, the number is 79 percent.

The average pay of our adjuncts—who teach nearly a third of all courses at UH, many of which are remedial or core courses—flitters at $20,000. No less flittering are the lights and A/C in many of their classrooms, often windowless and furnished with ramshackle desks and chairs.

But the everyday conditions of ours students and faculty weigh little in our administration's calculus. In the days leading up to Herman's decision, Chairman Fertitta declared that he did "not fear a bidding war....We're going to do whatever it takes to keep Tom."

President Khator agreed: "We love Tom. We will try and hang on to him."

Though they have failed to hang on to him, they seem to be hanging onto the goal of becoming nationally relevant through a football program. Between 2008 and 2014 the university shifted more than $100 million from academic programs to the athletic program. In his sobering account of collegiate football, Billion-Dollar Ball, Gilbert Gaul quotes UT's former athletic director DeLoss Dodds: "Football is the train that drives everything and pays for everything."

The sorry truth, as Gaul makes clear, is that only a few schools boast such trains. At schools like UH, football is instead the train that drives everything, but which everything must pay for.

This hemorrhage will not stop anytime soon: There are plans to build a $20 million indoor training facility for the team, one where the lights and A/C will always be at the right brightness and temperature. And Fertitta has done little to dispel rumors that the Cougars are considering Art Briles as Herman's replacement. (This is the same Art Briles who lost his coaching job at Baylor this year after it was revealed that he did not act on accusations of sexual assault leveled against two of his players.)

Fertitta's business background helps explain his impassioned embrace of sports at UH. A billionaire who has just launched a reality show, Fertitta made his fortune in transforming his restaurant chains into pleasure domes that offer the ersatz realities of boardwalks, seaside piers or rainforests (where the A/C also always works). A graduate of UH, he may see his alma mater as yet another opportunity to turn an institution of higher learning into a kind of post-modern Potemkin Village, a place for beer and circuses, where critical reading and writing will be offered as side dishes.

As for Khator, she may well have decided several years ago that she had no choice but to play the football card. (This is Texas, after all, where the gravitational pull of the gridiron can feel irresistible.) But here is where the lamentable shades into the tragic: The deck, it is clear, was always stacked, and the real losers will be the students.

Robert Zaretsky teaches at the University of Houston and is the author, most recently, of Boswell's Enlightenment. He's currently writing The Empress and the Philosophe: Catherine the Great, Denis Diderot and the Eclipse of the Enlightenment.

Bookmark Gray Matters. It's all about big stadiums, big bowl games, big profits, and big cable contracts.