Why military companies sponsor college football bowl games

The Bell Helicopter Armed Forces Bowl.

The Lockheed Martin Armed Forces Bowl.

The Military Bowl presented by Northrop Grumman.

The world’s most massive defense contractors have gotten into the college bowl game business over the last decade or so, pairing pigskin and patriotism to advertise themselves.

Lockheed Martin’s F-35 stealth fighter jet costs about $95 million. The bowl sponsored by Lockheed Martin is on the same day as the Dollar General Bowl, whose products cost slightly less.

“They’re honoring the people that use their equipment,” says Brant Ringler, the Armed Forces Bowl’s executive director. “They know — Lockheed Martin, are they gonna sell an F-35 to the common fan? No.

“But there are people that will be in their F-35s that either will be at our game or have flown in an F-35, could be on the football field and will fly in one of their future planes.”

There are 39 FBS bowls, not including the Playoff National Championship. The majority of those games aren’t all that prestigious. One way to keep a bowl game relevant, at least locally if not nationally, is to give it lots of events and a central theme to plan around. Those extracurriculars give a bowl game a chance to stand out.

One of the sport’s first bowl games was the Liberty Bowl, which started in Philadelphia in 1959. The founder was a former Notre Dame player, Bud Dudley, who’d flown bomber missions over Europe during World War II. When Dudley started the bowl game, he presented it as a celebration of American ideals.

The Liberty Bowl, now in Memphis, still has a patriotic theme. It incorporates a goal to “emphasize the principles of freedom, patriotism, and liberty...the very principles upon which our Bowl game was founded.”

The Armed Forces Bowl leans all the way in. The game features military inductions, a full-field American flag during the anthem, presentations for wounded soldiers, flyovers, and parachuters landing on the field before kickoff. It has a veterans’ village outside that offers aid to service members.

The Military Bowl is on the Naval Academy’s campus in Annapolis. Its events aren’t as explicitly patriotic — a wine walk and a parade with Budweiser Clydesdales are highlights — but America is still the backdrop. Budweiser sponsors a “Heroes” program that leads to service members getting honored on the field. The bowl’s organizers run a nearby retreat for wounded veterans and their families.

They have money to spend, and bowl games are a highly visible, highly American way to spend it.

In 2005, the Fort Worth Bowl’s third year, the game didn’t have a title sponsor. Ahead of 2006’s game, organizers sought something new to brand the game around.

That’s when the game became the Armed Forces Bowl. So the bowl went to Bell Helicopter, a Fort Worth-based aerospace company and defense contractor. (Going to national companies with local roots is a tried-and-true title sponsor approach.)

“And they were like, ‘Hey, we’ll support a football game, but what’s that hook or that niche that’s going to put it over the top?’” says Ringler. “Once we changed our name to the Armed Forces Bowl, they said, ‘Wow, this is our customer.’”

The story of how Northrop got the Military Bowl is not much different:

“For us, this is different,” said Randy Belote, Northrop’s vice president of strategic communications. “We might get a little image enhancement from it, but what we’ve tried to do is show a higher purpose and shine the spotlight on the USO.”

Northrop and the bowl, owned by the nonprofit D.C. Bowl Committee and managed by Lagardère Unlimited, worked together to create the Military Bowl title and incorporate USO into the official logo.

“Naming it the Military Bowl made it relevant to D.C., and our national security, so it became a great fit for us,” Belote said.

The bowl game has for years worked closely with the USO, a vets charity.

In 2017, Army and Navy are in the Armed Forces and Military, respectively. Army’s bowl deals vary, depending on the year, while the Military has a tie with Navy’s conference.

Lockheed had been a presenting sponsor of the game while Bell had the title.

“Lockheed Martin was literally sitting in the wings of another sponsor, and they had the wherewithal as the largest defense contractor in the world to step on board,” Ringler said. “They have an aeronautics division here in Fort Worth, and they have a missiles and fire control division in Grand Prairie, which is in the same DFW area. And so they literally take care of a variety of customers, veterans, with their products.”

Title sponsorship costs for bowl games are not public. But they’re usually somewhere in the seven figures and on the lower end of that for games earlier on the calendar. They were more commonly in the hundreds of thousands during the 2000s.

Contractors can afford it, and football games are good company for them to keep. They also might engender some goodwill from future candidates for jobs, or from people who could go on to control federal contracts.

Or to anybody else who wants to buy one of these, I guess.