Updated throughout the day with quick takes from staff.
Every year around this time, there's a flurry of articles complaining
about the number of bowl games. Usually these pieces start off with
something along the lines of "Who cares about [7-5 CUSA team]
versus [7-5 MAC team] in [place no one would ever go]?"
The answer, obviously, is no one. Last week, Mike Tunison linked to a piece that highlighted schools that had incurred some huge losses after bowl games, what with transportation and conference splits eating up supposedly huge bowl payouts. A lot of smaller bowls are basically money sinks at this point.
How is that possible when the NCAA mandates a minimum payout of $750,000? The bowls are robbing Peter to pay Peter in the form of ticket guarantees:
To make the bowl berth official, all [Western Michigan] had to do was buy 11,000 tickets to the game against Rice. The Broncos did so, paying $450,000 to the bowl for the tickets.
Go ahead and guess how many tickets Western Michigan sold to last year's Texas Bowl. Too high, too high, too high: 548. Western ended up eating over 400k in ticket expenses and the Texas Bowl got away with a functional payout of less than half of the NCAA's minimum.
Sure, some of the pain suffered by bigger programs is self-inflicted. When West Virginia ends up a million dollars in the red but drags 400 band members to the Fiesta Bowl at a cost of 700k, that's largely on West Virginia. When Florida makes a trip to the national championship game and pays for over 500 band members, cheerleaders and "VIPs" to go and takes a -- surpise! -- loss, that is 100% on Florida. Any time you see a big name school go to a big bowl and come home with a big red number, the reason is that the university is using the trip as a junket for a cast of thousands. The bowls shouldn't have any shame about that.
Tiny bowls that cater to the Western Michigans of the world, on the other hand, appear to be skirting the NCAA's regulations with these ticket guarantees. Hell, some bowls have the audacity to charge the schools considerably more than the market will bear:
Last year, Virginia Tech earned a berth in the Orange Bowl and was required to buy 17,500 tickets at $125 each. It only sold 3,342 of them, leading to a loss of $1.77 million for the university and the Atlantic Coast Conference, records show.
A Hokies athletics official speculated the reason for the weak sales was the weak economy, the expensive trip to Miami and cheaper tickets available to fans on the Internet. "Many Hokie fans bought that way rather than through our ticket office," Assistant Athletic Director Lisa Rudd said.
The Orange Bowl still has a major television deal and put more into the ACC's kitty than it took out; the Texas Bowl almost certainly can't say the same.
So if you're a small school with a tenuous budget and you get to 7-5, you've got a nasty choice. You can spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to send your team to a bowl that will be on ESPN on December 23rd, or you can kill your program. Imagine trying to recruit against other members of your conference if you said thanks-but-no-thanks to a bowl. You'd get killed.
Since a sizable cut of their guarantee is being fed right back to the bowl in the form of ticket guarantees that aren't coming close to being met even for BCS games, the result is a net loss for everyone except the bowl operators. (One reason you'll never see this story on ESPN: the network now operates a half-dozen bowl games of little repute.) The MAC received a $2.1 million kickback from the BCS last year; bowl games the conference actually played in lost more money than they brought in. This is a familiar story: programs unable to actually pay players spend money in a thousand other ways, competing against each other on the margins and introducing a cottage industry of middlemen taking a cut.
I'm not making an argument that they should actually pay the kids here, but the NCAA might want to step in and make these guarantees a thing of the past. A half-dozen bowls would wither and die, but that would be a relief to the athletic directors that had to prop them up.
This post originally appeared on the Sporting Blog. For more, see The Sporting Blog Archives.
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Comments
An eye-opening article. Yathink Orrin Hatch or Joe Barton would be interested in this? Hell, no! Since it doesn’t have "National Championship" implications and doesn’t affect whether their pet schools get invited to a BCS game, they could care less! And if, as the article states, ESPN won’t even report it because of its conflict of interest, of course the lawmakers won’t dare to stick their heads into the maw.
But this practice really is a nasty one. Much nastier than the BCS system.
by XofDallas on Dec 21, 2009 7:53 PM EST reply actions
I enjoy watching the Bowl games no matter who is playing.
by Undertime Pitbulls on Dec 21, 2009 8:37 PM EST reply actions
ESPN was so much better when is was independent. Disney has ruined what was once a great network. Great stuff Brian, something you don’t even think about as a fan.
by stadium&main on Dec 22, 2009 7:25 AM EST reply actions
I lived in Texas for four years, and went to the Armed Forces Bowl once. Lots of fun, tickets were $25 ($15 for end zone seats).
I have to believe that Texas Bowl tickets and Armed Forces Bowl tickets (New Years’ Eve games in Houston and Dallas) are comparable values.
MAybe Orange Bowl tickets have a realistic face value of $125. But Texas Bowl tickets for $41 a pop is robbery. Even if Western Michigan had to buy (and then give away or burn) 11,000 tickets as a kickback, that would be $275,000, not $450,000.
MAybe the Texas Bowl could have invited some other school that could have sold more tickets that Western Michigan. But the $40 ticket price means $175,000 in pure kickback.
by johnbragg on Dec 22, 2009 10:34 AM EST reply actions
What sucks about the small bowl games is that you get .500 teams in them. i understand that 6-wins pretty much gives you a bowl berth but at the same time if you have a chance to end the season with a losing record you should not be in a bowl game.
Once bowl games started naming themselves after the city and/or state that they are in is when there was officially to many bowl games.
I would change it so that bowl games must pay out to the teams at least $750,000-plus to each team. If that cannot be met, then the bowl goes into the history books. Plus teams should have at least 7-wins to be eligible to be in a bowl. Make it so that even if you lose, the worse you can finish is .500.
Also i would get rid of all the conference tie ins as well. I would just have conference champs keep their bowl agreements. After that then the bowl should be allowed to select any eligible team they want. If they invite a team and they turn it down then go get someone else to fill the spot beside some .500 team because their conference has a contract agreement with the bowl in case they cannot find an opponent.
by jdmurph0 on Dec 22, 2009 12:22 PM EST reply actions
Maybe a 16 team playoff with the NCAA using some of the minor bowls as venues would help out this situation. Heck make it 32 teams. Giving the minor bowls a shot, for one game of hosting a BCS type team. I know, I’m dreaming. Everyone else has playoffs in every sport and since football pretty much carries every college and universities other sports programs, why not a playoff? The Texas Bowl or whatever Bowl has Alabama vs. Western Michigan in the first round or whoever is ranked number 32. I’d love it. Merry Christmas Everyone!!
by 1984OlympicGamer on Dec 24, 2009 4:41 PM EST reply actions
GREAT story. yet, the powers that be in the illegal bowl monopoly think that a playoff would ruin the little bowls. on the contrary, it would SAVE the little bowls. Imagine a #1 Alabama playing a #16 Oregon State team in, say, the poinsetia bowl? Don’t you think the people at the poinsetia bowl would DROOL at the thought of a number one team coming to THEIR bowl? you think they might sell some tickets? you bet your sweet @ss they would! they could never get a marquee match-up EVER otherwise, so there is no wonder these bowls are porrly attended and don’t really make any money. Set up a playoff using the smallerbowls as first round games (rotating the #1 vs #16 matchup, and so on) between the bowls each year, and then the bigger bowls play host to the next round, and the ‘biggest’ boels rotate hosting a true championship game. how would this NOT work? all the games take place during the chirtmas break – so we’re not talking about screwing with academics (another thing the B_S honks like to claim)
by commonsenseguy on Dec 30, 2009 2:44 AM EST reply actions
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