General

Small Bowl Games Rob Peter To Pay Peter

Dec 21, 2009, 8:30 PM UTC

â†µEvery year around this time, there's a flurry of articles complainingâ†µabout the number of bowl games. Usually these pieces start off withâ†µsomething along the lines of "Who cares about [7-5 CUSA team]â†µversus [7-5 MAC team] in [place no one would ever go]?" â†µ

â†µâ†µThe answer, obviously, is no one. Last week, Mike Tunison linked to aâ†µpiece that highlighted schools that had incurred some huge losses after bowl games, what withâ†µtransportation and conference splits eating up supposedlyâ†µhuge bowl payouts. A lot of smaller bowls are basically money sinks atâ†µthis point. â†µ

â†µâ†µHow is that possible when the NCAA mandates a minimum payout ofâ†µ$750,000? The bowls are robbing Peter to pay Peter in the form of ticket guarantees: â†µ

â†µâ†µâ‡¥To make the bowl berth official, all [Western Michigan] had to do wasâ†µâ‡¥buy 11,000 tickets to the game against Rice. The Broncos did so, payingâ†µâ‡¥$450,000 to the bowl for the tickets.â†µâ†µâ†µGo ahead and guess how many tickets Western Michigan sold to lastâ†µyear’s Texas Bowl. Too high, too high, too high: 548. Western ended upâ†µeating over 400k in ticket expenses and the Texas Bowl got away with aâ†µfunctional payout of less than half of the NCAA’s minimum. â†µ

â†µâ†µSure, some of the pain suffered by bigger programs is self-inflicted.â†µWhen West Virginia ends up a million dollars in the red but drags 400 bandâ†µmembers to the Fiesta Bowl at a cost of 700k, that’s largely on Westâ†µVirginia. When Florida makes a trip to the national championship gameâ†µand pays for over 500 band members, cheerleaders andâ†µ“VIPs” to go and takes a -- surpise! -- loss, that is 100% onâ†µFlorida. Any time you see a big name school go to a big bowl and comeâ†µhome with a big red number, the reason is that the university is usingâ†µthe trip as a junket for a cast of thousands. The bowls shouldn’t haveâ†µany shame about that.â†µ

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â†µTiny bowls that cater to the Western Michigans of the world, on theâ†µother hand, appear to be skirting the NCAA's regulations with theseâ†µticket guarantees. Hell, some bowls have the audacity to charge theâ†µschools considerably more than the market will bear:â†µ

â†µâ†µâ‡¥Last year, Virginiaâ†µâ‡¥Tech earned a berth in the Orange Bowl and was required to buyâ†µâ‡¥17,500 tickets at $125 each. It only sold 3,342 of them, leading to aâ†µâ‡¥loss of $1.77 million for the university and the Atlanticâ†µâ‡¥Coast Conference, records show.â†µâ‡¥
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â†µâ‡¥A Hokies athletics official speculated the reason for the weak salesâ†µâ‡¥was the weak economy, the expensive trip to Miami and cheaperâ†µâ‡¥tickets available to fans on the Internet. “Many Hokie fans bought thatâ†µâ‡¥way rather than through our ticket office,” Assistant Athletic Directorâ†µâ‡¥Lisa Rudd said. â†µâ†µâ†µThe Orange Bowl still has a major television deal and put more intoâ†µthe ACC’s kitty than it took out; the Texas Bowl almost certainly can’tâ†µsay the same. â†µ

â†µâ†µSo if you’re a small school with a tenuous budget and you get to 7-5,â†µyou’ve got a nasty choice. You can spend hundreds of thousands ofâ†µdollars to send your team to a bowl that will be on ESPN on December 23rd,â†µor you can kill your program. Imagine trying to recruit against otherâ†µmembers of your conference if you said thanks-but-no-thanks to a bowl.â†µYou’d get killed.â†µ

â†µâ†µSince a sizable cut of their guarantee is being fed right back to theâ†µbowl in the form of ticket guarantees that aren’t coming close to being metâ†µeven for BCS games, the result is a net loss for everyone except the bowlâ†µoperators. (One reason you’ll never see this story on ESPN: the networkâ†µnow operates a half-dozen bowl games of little repute.) The MAC receivedâ†µa $2.1 million kickback from the BCS last year; bowl games theâ†µconference actually played in lost more money than they brought in. Thisâ†µis a familiar story: programs unable to actually pay players spend moneyâ†µin a thousand other ways, competing against each other on the marginsâ†µand introducing a cottage industry of middlemen taking a cut. â†µ

â†µâ†µI’m not making an argument that they should actually pay the kidsâ†µhere, but the NCAA might want to step in and make these guarantees aâ†µthing of the past. A half-dozen bowls would wither and die, but that wouldâ†µbe a relief to the athletic directors that had to prop them up.â†µ

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This post originally appeared on the Sporting Blog. For more, see The Sporting Blog Archives.

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