Why neutral-site games took over college football’s opening weekend

Some of the biggest games at the start of this college football season won’t happen on campus. Instead, they’ll be in shiny NFL venues, with branded names. The two biggest this year:

And there are several others just in Week 1:

They’ve existed in one way or another for a long time. Texas and Oklahoma have had annual meetings at the Cotton Bowl in Dallas since 1932, for example.

But in the last few years, they’ve proliferated, becoming more and more exotic, including games in Ireland. Last year had Tennessee and Virginia Tech playing in front of an all-time-record football crowd at a dang racetrack.

Alabama and Florida State are getting paid $5 million apiece for their appearances in the Chick-fil-a Game. That’s on the high end of neutral-site payouts, because this is the sexiest season-opening game in the history of college football. The compensation package also includes free hotel rooms and a bunch of tickets, which big-drawing teams can sell to their fans. Both CFA games are sellouts, organizers announced.

Florida State is designated as the away team and giving up a home game in Tallahassee. Alabama is not. The Tide will still play seven home games.

But for FSU, playing in this game is still good business:

Although the Seminoles will sacrifice a home game by playing Alabama at a neutral site, the program will benefit financially. FSU nets about $2.3 million per home game and expects to spend about $275,000 in expenses for the trip to Atlanta. The difference will be about a $2.5 million windfall for the athletic department … not to mention the attention and focus on a game pairing two of the country’s most traditional and successful programs.

The average payout for these bigger games had been north of $4 million for the couple of seasons before this one was announced, the Palm Beach Post reported. That’d be a ridiculous amount for any team to make off a home game at its own stadium.

The games are at neutral sites because city commissions and game organizers push for them. It’s also easier to convince two big teams to play a game if nobody has to do it in a difficult road environment. Sometimes teams schedule home-and-home series to make that even, but that’s a whole different thing.

Consider both Bama-FSU and Michigan-Florida. All four are massive state schools with similarly huge football fan bases. The Tide and Seminoles enter their game as top-five teams and Playoff favorites. The Wolverines and Gators are top-25 teams, too, and they’ll draw in television viewers who don’t root for them. All four are major draws, which means big ticket sales and TV numbers.

For Chick-fil-A and AdvoCare, the sponsors of these two mega-games, they’ll be chances to get their names in front of huge audiences. Both companies have decided it’s worth it to bribe schools into giving up home games.

Let’s excerpt SB Nation’s Steven Godfrey in 2015, talking with the head of one city’s sports commission, which has been involved in setting up these games:

“More and more athletic directors are pursuing these games,” the commission head said, “but where do you put them on TV? Last year, we had one on Thursday night and two against each other in primetime on Saturday on ESPN properties. Does FOX get involved? I doubt NBC would help create a game when they already have Notre Dame, but FOX might create one or two more major spots.”

The biggest difference between neutral kickoffs and bowls is that bowls sell their TV rights to networks, whereas neutral games fall under the existing TV agreements for the participating schools’ conferences. Event organizers don’t get a dime from TV.

“There are three major forms of revenue [in the bowl model]: ticket sales, sponsorships and TV rights. Regular season games lose one of those revenue sources [TV] immediately,” the city chief said. “That’s why you need a major corporate sponsor to buy the naming rights at a much higher cost than the smaller bowls that exist to serve ESPN. And a corporate sponsor wants primetime national exposure. If the game is relegated to a regional broadcast midday, that will hurt.”

In 2015, partner channels ESPN and ABC counter-programmed one another, airing simultaneous neutral-site games from Dallas and Houston. Last year, a Georgia-North Carolina game in Atlanta ran through the start time of Alabama-USC in Dallas. This year, ABC’s Bama-FSU and ESPN’s BYU-LSU somewhat overlap.

College football’s opening weekend now runs five days from Thursday to Monday, but there’s always going to be a scarcity of open time slots. Only so many sponsored games can exist without sucking up each other’s limelight, thus making them less lucrative.

The games will always be limited to big-drawing teams. Otherwise, ticket sales are impossible, because these games are expensive and require fans to buy hotel rooms to travel to them. That means there’ll always be a smallish pool of candidates to play them in the first place. There’s a reason it’s Michigan-Florida, not Rutgers-Vanderbilt.

You’re going to watch Bama-FSU. They’re going to enjoy their $5 million, and Chick-fil-A’s going to enjoy a weekend of having its logo in front of tens of millions of people. As long as all those parties win, big neutral-site games will keep happening.