Bowl season has begun. Starting with the New Orleans Bowl and ending with the Super Bowl, the American media consumer has begun a 40 day feast of spectacular football. There are 39 Collegiate level bowls if you count the final for the new College Football Playoff. The Final game has not been Bowl-branded which makes it easier to move it to the house of the highest bidder. For now, though Dr. Pepper is the presenting sponsor of the new National Championship Trophy, BCS Properties LLC – itself a 500 million a year company - is just calling it the Championship Game. In today’s increasingly unequal America, when a few people win, usually a much larger group loses. Two related phenomena are worth considering as part of a larger trend: As Bowl games and college sports have become increasingly more profitable, the cost of tuition and education have risen just as fast. In both cases, the losers are a generation of students who have been turned into profit centers, using the young to enrich the established instead of investing in them as an important social end in itself.
One reason for sports media’s extraordinary popularity in America is because sports dramatize a world filled with winners, and people who rarely get to experience what it is to win get to feel this thrill when their favorite team does. The spectacle of collegiate athletics blends this thrill with the idea of education by promoting the figure of the amateur student-athlete playing the game for more than just money. American companies pay billions a year to associate their brands with the idea of education by way of collegiate sports sponsorship. Of all the sports, nothing brings in as much ad revenue as the corporate friendly spectacle of well-conditioned student-athletes lined up in phalanx football formation guided by hardnosed CEO-type coaches. During the bowl season, consumers can watch hours upon hours of hard-working students playing football, which will also subject them to hundreds of hours of advertising, sold for whatever the market will bear. And it bears a lot for bowl games. ESPN, which paid more than $150 million per year to broadcast the five BCS games last year, is banking on it. The network reportedly paid $7.3 billion overall for the 12-year TV rights and, with annual revenues at around $10 billion, will still make a huge profit. In a just world, more of those billions would go to everyday students, the one’s whose tuition and debt burden has risen right along side those profits might benefit. Yet that’s not how things work in America.
Given the state of American inequality, football has become the quintessential American game. As a spectacle, there is much more to the bowl game than the game on the field. You might even say that the football game itself is a clever misdirect, focusing the attention of the cheering crowd so that the audience doesn’t notice the well-manicured hands picking the collective pocket book. We tune in for the entertainment, cheering on the exploits of the student athletes and rooting for our favorite team, but what kind of message are we consuming? Are we honoring student-athletes or paying tribute to a system that exploits the young?
Buying bowl game sponsorship is a great deal for the buyers. The market valuation for getting associated with a bowl is typically multiple times the investment. This is why R&L Carriers paid to sponsor Nevada v. Louisiana-Lafayette in the New Orleans Bowl, Hyundai paid to be associated with ASU v. Duke in Sun Bowl, AutoZone paid to get mentioned with Texas A&M and West Virginia in the Liberty Bowl, Bitcoin paid to remind the media world it still exists at the St. Petersburg Bowl, and Chick-fil-A paid to mix their brand with Ole Miss and TCU in the Peach Bowl. The closer they get to the New Year, the higher the cost and the greater the payoff. And it’s not just for the sponsors. Bowls themselves are hugely profitable and because our tax laws are absurd, most bowls are considered “non-profits charities “ so the money they make is tax-free. For example, the Sugar Bowl, though sitting on cash reserves of $12.5 million, $20.8 million in publicly traded securities and paying their CEO makes over 600, 000 a year, is still considered a “non-profit.” Such charities are obliged by law to serve a “public purpose,” but are they?
Athletic Conferences also cash in big during bowl spectacle season. Under the revenue sharing system developed this year, which is different from the old BCS model, the rich get richer. The Power conferences (ACC, Big 12, Big Ten, Pac-12 and SEC) that spend more on their football teams get approximately $50 million a piece this year. The other five FBS-level leagues get $15 million each. There are all kinds of incentives structures above that base. Conferences receive $300, 000 for each team that wins enough games to participate in a bowl, $4 million for every team selected for one of the prime non-playoff bowl (last year the Cotton, Fiesta and Peach), and if a conferences includes one of the four participants in the playoff bowls, they make an extra $6 million. All of this doesn’t count the revenue that will come from the contracts that conferences have with the “non-profit charity” bowls themselves. So this year, when the Rose and Sugar Bowls serve as the semi-finals, the conferences that normally have contracts with these bowls get $40 million more.
Bill Hancock, the executive director of the College Football Playoff says this flow of capital is all good: “There’s more money for everybody.” Considering that Hancock made over half a million last year running the old BCS, you know why he’s happy, but not everyone gets a piece of the pie. Everyday students go hungry. Indeed, in this strangely distributed economy, these “non-profit charities” avoid paying the very taxes that would help replete education budgets that have been slashed across the country over the last two decades so as to make more money available to the wealthiest amongst us. If you want to get a sense of where all that money sloshing through the big money bowl season flows, a closer look at the two semi-final bowls and the championship game reveals a great deal.
The Rose Bowl comes first on ESPN and features the Oregon Ducks vs. the Florida State Seminoles. These are two teams from power conferences that spend money to make money. Oregon’s program is newer, having been kick-started to contender status in the 90s by Nike founder Phil Knight. The Ducks, not to mention hundreds of other student athletes who wear branded team apparel everywhere they go on college teams across America, serve as the medium for his brand message. Last year, Knight gave the team a $68 million football facility, a small amount given how much he has made selling sports gear to teams and their fans. Oregon football brought in $52 million but spent $20 million, making it the most efficient earners of the four teams. The new head coach Mark Helfrich, the least expensive of the four coaches, makes $1.8 million which, though it makes him the highest paid public employee in Oregon, is a bargain compared to the $3.8 million Chip Kelly made last year before he left for a bigger pay day with the Philadelphia Eagles. There is a sense of urgency, as their Heisman winning quarterback, Marcus Mariota, is off to the pros. So this is the pay-off year, a point that the ESPN marketing department is now hammering with increasing repetition. Things are good for athletics at Oregon, but at a time when the revenues generated by football players have increased dramatically, the average students are also playing paying increasingly more. In 2008, in-state students paid $6,500 a year, last year it was $9,852; that’s a 51% increase in five years. Oregon is not unique in turning students into profit centers to compensate for decreased funding from the State. On average, U.S. states have cut higher education funding by 11 percent since 2008, according to a study by researchers at Illinois State University. It’s no surprise that the annual increase in tuition and fees at public Universities over the last 25 years has been around 4%. Interestingly, during the same period, revenues from spectacularized college sports continued to grow yet it went increasingly to coaches and broadcasting companies instead of students.
The picture of the other Rose Bowl contender tells another part of the story. The Seminoles have had a great year on the field, but off the field Florida State has been a case study in cult-like excesses of big money football. Their hottest media commodity, last year’s Heisman-winner Jameis Winston, has been accused of rape, bullying students and receiving special treatment. Yet he still plays on, for there are millions of dollars riding on him. The Florida State athletic department brings in over $81 million in revenue (8.6% of that is from public subsidies) and $34 million of that comes from football. Yet Seminole football is less cost efficient than Oregon, spending around $22 million a year. Around $3.5 million of that money pays coach Jimbo Fisher’s base salary, and about the same amount goes to his assistants. Though this makes Fisher the highest paid public employee in Florida and the 14th highest in the college ranks, he makes a whole lot more in bonus money if he hits his incentives. When his team won the ACC Championship, he got $100 K for the win, and after the Seminoles made the playoff championship, he got another $75 K. If he beats Oregon, he will get another $200k. Jimbo, like his FBS college coaching brethren, has gotten rich recruiting and coaching students. Meanwhile, students and parents in Florida have endured tuition increases of over 45% in the last five years as Florida has diverted money from education to pay for tax cuts for people like Jimbo.
The second FCS playoff game is the Allstate Sugar Bowl, featuring Ohio State and Alabama. The Sugar Bowl – again a non-profit charity with around $34 million in the bank - pays no taxes, but is subsidized by a Louisiana government that has continued to cut funding for public education. This seeming absurdity is a managerial coup, and the CEO and his top aids pay themselves handsomely for their work, having mastered the art of writing off things like promotion, lobbying payoffs and corporate perks - like declaring parties and “entertainment” as expenses related to their “public charity.” Ohio State’s football team is one of the most profitable in the country. Last year it brought in around $58 million in revenues while spending $34 million in expenses. Part of the reason it spent $12 million more than FSU last year is the price of coach Urban Meyer’s $4.536 million salary and that of his expensive assistants. Yet they seem to deliver a good show. OSU is #1 in attendance, which – along with the revenue generated by selling out students season tickets for $252 each - is a huge factor in the bowl game media market, where schools at the other bowls are often chosen based on the size of their fan base. With OSU and Alabama competing, the size of the built-in commodity audience for advertisers to deluge with impressions will have them competing for expensive commercial spots. This excited fan base is crucial for the ongoing profitability of the athletic department, for a good deal of the football revenue comes from additional alumni fundraising from the powerful Buckeye Club, and from interest on the separate endowment created to benefit football. This additional fan base revenue is important, because paying the small coaching staff what it would cost to pay 100 full time faculty at OSU means there isn’t much left to go around after the scholarships are paid. Moreover, the idea of playing for the glory of the fan base is enough for the dozens of athletes who effectively pay-to-play. Big teams with 85 scholarships often have around 30 players paying tuition and this year at OSU, they paid more. Thanks to Gov. John Kasich’s slashes to the education budget, Ohio now ranks in the bottom 10 in aid per student amongst the states. These tuition paying walk-ons expose themselves to a lot more risk playing football than just debt. Just last month, walk-on Kosta Karageorge experienced depression likely related to chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) that led to his suicide. In the wake of this tragedy, Urban Meyer has defended the treatment of walk-ons, saying that the rules now allow – but don’t compel - teams to feed them. OSU does, which is some consolation at a time when University communities across the country are having to set up food banks to feed students who, after paying tuition, have no money left for food. If they follow their normal PR procedure dealing with criticism and bad press, the NCAA will sanctimoniously slap some fine on OSU and punish it for letting Karageorge play with concussions, thereby creating a shaming spectacle to divert attention from the structural problems of a sport that causes CTE at an alarming 3 times greater rate than other sports: anything to protect the image of a billion dollar spectacle that profits from the sacrifice of its young. The NCAA is running scared on this issue, having just reached a 70 million settlement relating to future CTE suits out of which the NCAA agreed to pay for diagnosis after the fact.
Across the line of scrimmage from OSU at the Sugar Bowl will be Alabama, which pulls in $82 million in total football revenue; it also spends the most of any team at close to $37 million a year and counting. Earlier this year, when the University of Texas – which because it cut out the broadcasting middle man and runs its own profitable sports channel is now listed by Forbes as the most valuable football team – tried to lure away coach Nick Saban, Alabama upped his salary to $7.16 million, and threw in other elite tax-free perks like the boosters paying off his mortgage. Alabama’s assistant coaches, whose salaries range from Kirby Smart’s $1.35 million to a cool $428K for the bottom few, cost the school a whopping $5.2 million a year. Few places worship the cult of coaching personality as much as Alabama, where their sartorial slogan announces their cultural values plainly: “Alabama is football.” Instead of heaping money at the feet of these cult leaders to justify their fervent belief (that money has to go somewhere, the argument goes), why not oblige teams to show some fiscal restraint by diverting 25% of the profits to general scholarships. The only thing more outlandish than the coaching salaries at Alabama is the 9 foot bronze statue of Nick Saban outside the temple for the Crimson faithful; Just ask people at Penn State if putting bronzed coaches up on a pedestal is a good exercise in perspective. Yet salaries and statues are not the only thing being raised in Tuscaloosa. Alabama chancellor Dr. Robert Witt, who manages a state system that has been cut at the fourth highest rate for any state (nearly $556 million slashed from higher education, around 28%, since 2008), has raised tuition annually. This year, he is thinking about cutting food and health services to everyday students and has asked administrators to ask of all school programs, “Should we even be doing it in the first place?” But in relation to football culture, Witt spells out Alabama’s priorities without reservation: “Nick Saban’s the best financial investment this university has ever made.” So while Saban and his assistants profit from the exploits of their players, the state of Alabama continues to divest in its college age citizens, raising the price of tuition and relying on them to mortgage their future to get an education.
Alabama is not unique. Across the land, states have divested from education rather than treating it as a sound investment in the future. And tuition has risen accordingly, a trend which led Secretary of Education Arne Duncan to argue, "as a nation, we need more college graduates in order to stay competitive in the global economy. But if the costs keep on rising, especially at a time when family incomes are hurting, college will become increasingly unaffordable for the middle class." But though everyone decries the cost of education, few States are willing to invest real resources in it. It seems they would rather spend money on sports surrounding collegiate education and leave it at that. The spectacle of the championship game, to be held at AT&T stadium in Arlington TX, is a perfect symbol of this unequal and coercive system.
No stadium in the country is more symptomatic of the shift in big-time football spectacles as AT&T stadium, which will also host the Cotton Bowl again this year. With its huge jumbo screen, wi-fi hotspots for lots of branded “interactive connectivity” (including exclusive content for AT&T customers), walls of corporate boxes filled with thousands of tvs and wall to wall consumer branding, it is a harbinger of the future of sports entertainment. Jerry Jones convinced the city of Arlington to put up a good deal of cash to build the stadium and to use eminent domain to remove the cash-strapped families who didn’t want to relocate. The Cotton Bowl was moved to “Jerry World” stadium in 2010. Dr Pepper will be the presenting sponsor for the Championship Game, and will use the build up to promote their “Tuition Giveaway Program” which acknowledges the crisis in student debt, while profiting from appearing to do something about it. Based on an online contest with user generated content – essays and pictures submitted by desperate students– the whole campaign aims to give away 1 million dollars in tuition at a time when the student debt mark in America is approaching 1 trillion dollars. Assuring lucky winners $5K each, this is truly a drop in the bucket. The advertising value of this empty gesture will be huge. It gives the appearance of caring about the student debt problem while using student-generated social media content to associate the commodity brand with youth and the idea of higher education. It is a shrewd campaign and a perfect cap to a bowl season that is as tasteless as, well, Dr. Pepper. Just like in the bowl game, a lucky few will win the trophy and get their bonuses, and the rest of us, especially students all across America, will continue to pay. Universities should renegotiate with the broadcasting companies that depend on their students for product, and should demand much more from the athletic departments that operate in an increasingly separate and unequal world. The profits reaped from bowl games should go toward lowering the cost of education for everyone, not just enriching the few. Then we might truly have something to cheer about.
Instead, America has become a society that, like the corporations that saturate our airwaves with commercials, wants to be associated with supporting education as an idea, but refuses to actually pay for it. Instead of prioritizing education as a social value, we pay for distraction; instead of investing in students as the best hope for our future, we turn them into profit centers and hope that nobody notices with all the cheering under the lights.