Analyzing ‘Death To The BCS’ : Chapter Four

With the Miami Hurricanes sitting out a bowl game in 2011, there’s definitely some downtime this post-season and with the BCS looking as messy as ever, now seemed as good a time as any to revisit “Death To The BCS”, the book touted as ‘the definitive case against the Bowl Championship Series’.

“Death To The BCS” is a an eighteen-chapter read. Last entry we focused on Chapter Three : Obstruction Of Justice. Next up; Chapter Four : Lies, Damn Lies, and Bowl Payouts. Seems pretty fitting today, with all the big name bowl games getting underway.

– In December 2008, three weeks from kickoff, the Motor City Bowl didn’t have an opponent for Central Michigan. Bids went out to the seventy-one bowl eligible teams and only five remained, but instead of the bowl’s executive director Ken Hoffman sat back and waited for the phone to ring.

A bidding war ensued between San Jose State and Florida Atlantic, both vying to be in the D-level bowl game, with the “winner” being whoever decided to take less.

San Jose State offered to take $250K of the bowl’s $750K-per-team payout, taking the rest in impossible-to-sell game tickets, while Florida Atlantic took no cash and all tickets, earning them the right to play. In the end, the Owls received essentially nothing, even though the media touted the $750K-per-team payout.

– Bowl games don’t pay for transportation, lodging or most team meals, so shortly after cutting deal with the Motor City Bowl, FAU athletic director Craig Angelos – one of the rare ADs who doesn’t get a bonus for reaching a money-losing bowl – was faced with the task of figuring out how to not lose hundreds of thousands of dollars getting his team to Detroit.

Angelos started by leaving his marching band at home, teaming up with a high school band in Detroit, saving his program $80K. Another $10K was saved by the Owls flying home immediately after the game, as opposed to another night in a hotel.

The Sun Belt Conference kicked in $250K, but even with Angelos’ number crunching, FAU was still almost $42K shy in covering its 16-person traveling party.

– Bowl games advertise big, flashy payouts, giving fans and outsiders the impression that bowl games are profitable and beneficial for every team, making for a positive system that must at all costs be preserved.

In all reality, The Cartel and the bowls’ fat cats are the only ones getting paid. When athletic departments compare actual payouts with expenses, the collective payouts are dramatically slimmer than advertised.

– Most bowl games leave schools in the red, requiring conferences to pool bowl payouts and take revenue generated by BCS games to cover the losses from the lower-tier ones.

– Most bowl contracts stipulate that the team, admin, cheerleaders, band and top university brass must travel to an often-distant location for up to eight nights. For its appearance in the 2010 Rose Bowl, Ohio State coughed up over $2M on travel, meals and entertainment for it’s BCS showing.

– The most onerous part of the bowl scam is the so-called “ticket guarantee”, which requires teams to buy thousands of full priced seats that can barely be resold in full. (Fans know games don’t sell out, so they wait for ticket prices to plummet online. On the day of the 2009 Music City Bowl, tickets were available for $19 apiece on StubHub.)

– The 2008 PapaJohns.com Bowl advertised a payout of $300K per team, yet required each school to sell 10,000 tickets, costing both Rutgers and NC State athletic departments $400K each. Nearly half of the capacity of 71,594-seat Legion Field saw the Scarlet Knights prevail, 29-23.

For $300K and a “pizza bowl” appearance, NC State shelled out $730K while Rutgers spent $1.2M. Rutgers only sold 4,650 tickets, absorbing a loss of $214K out the gate, while simply qualifying for a bowl game triggered almost $270K in bonuses and extra pay.

Rutgers hurt itself. as well. Twenty-one Rutgers executives and administrators spent $28,950 getting to the game (almost $1,400 per person) and blew through $60,168 in six days on room, food and booze, in Birmingham, Alabama.

– Other insane bowl expenses: Iowa spent $328,340 for its band to attend the 2009 Outback Bowl and the Orange Bowl spent $531,250 on it’s halftime show the same year.

– Maryland had $135K in tickets to the 2009 Humanitarian Bowl go unsold and it cost the Terps $480K to fly the team and travel party to the game in Boise, ID. Meals and lodging were over $200K and in the end, it cost the program over $1M to play in a game with a listed payout of $750K.

– Bigger schools and bigger bowl games get hit, too. Ohio State was obligated to purchase 17,500 tickets to the 2009 Fiesta Bowl and after only selling 9,983 ended up losing over $1M. The Buckeyes couldn’t even sell out their 2010 Rose Bowl allotment, eating almost $150K in empty seats.

– “The majority of the bowls are underwritten by the conferences to provide post-season opportunities,” said Gene Bleymaier, athletic director at Boise State. “On paper you might get a payout. But you’re giving it right back to them because you’re required to buy tickets and / or sponsorships.”

“The bowl says, ‘I’m going to give you $750,000, but you’re required to sell $600,000 worth of tickets and $100,000 in sponsorships,” said Bleymaier. “Schools do it so they can say they went to a bowl game.”

– “Half of two-thirds of all bowl ticket sales are basically a money push,” said MWC commissioner Craig Thompson. “I’ve got to pay for my ten thousand tickets, so here’s my check for $600,000. Then you pay me the $750,000 ‘bowl payout’. Why even go through the charade? Why don’t I just buy the 3,800 tickets my fans want? Or don’t make my buy tickets and don’t pay me for anything.”

“They only do it for public-relations value. It isn’t a real figure. They’ve just inflated it and come up with this $750,000 number because it sounds good.”

– Creative accounting helps preserve the illusion that all bowl games are profitable for all schools. Most conferences pool payouts, allowing a BCS bid to cover the costs for money-losing mid- and lower-tier bowls.

According to official BCS payout documents, the power conferences were guaranteed at least $19.8M in 2010. Many conferences cut each school a check whether or not it participated. Others offer extra for participating teams to defray costs.

The system allows lower-tier bowl teams to live off the welfare of BCS bowl teams, yet in the grand scheme, the pooling of bowl revenue costs everyone millions.

– The University of Florida’s appearance in the 2009 BCS title game came with an advertised payout of $17.5M. The SEC took the money, along with the payouts from seven other bowls with conference teams participated in.

The SEC then divided up the money thirteen ways – one for each of the league’s twelve teams and one for the conference office – and provided extra to Florida for reaching the title game, giving the Gators a total payout of just under $2.5M.

Between coaches’ bonuses, travel costs, tickets, band and cheerleaders, the total travel from Gainesville to Miami was just over $2.4M, so in the end, for winning the BCS championship game, the University of Florida made roughly $47,000.

– Florida home games gross an estimated $5M and in 2009, UF paid Charleston Southern upwards of $450,000 to play in Gainesville – roughly ten times what it was paid for a title game appearance.

– Bowl directors estimate that only fourteen of the thirty-five games generate a legitimate profit for the participating teams.

– “I think a lot of schools feel very strongly that, no matter what the cost, they have to go to a bowl game,” said Pete Dalis, former UCLA athletic director. “In my nineteen years in this business, I’ve found they really don’t alter the future. I think it’s a myth.”

Dalis pushed back years ago when the Humanitarian Bowl courted a 7-4 UCLA team. UCLA, who started 6-0 and had title game aspirations, wasn’t a desperate, smaller program happy to go bowling and Dalis blew the whistle regarding the bowl game’s fine print, which included – selling 5,000 tickets at $33 apiece, a donation in the form of a “corporate sponsorship” and a minimum five-night stay in Boise.

Dalis stated that UCLA stood to lose $300,000 by accepting a bid to a game that advertised a $750,000 payout and turned the bid down.

“UCLA felt a fiduciary responsibility to at least break even in the bowl game,” said Dalis. “We never said we weren’t interested in playing in the game, just unwilling to lose several hundred thousand dollars to play.”

Almost a decade later, nothing has changed.

– Next up; Chapter Five : High-Paid Blazers.

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