By Last Updated on December 11, 2013
The stage is set for the college football bowl season, which means conferences and teams can start adding bowl payouts to their respective budgets. That’s because bowl payouts are based on participation, not upon who wins or loses.
Another little-known fact is that BCS bowl payouts are based upon your conference affiliation, not the BCS bowl game you’re selected to play. The nine conferences competing at the Football Bowl Subdivision level are divided into two groups: automatic-qualifiers and non-automatic qualifiers. The AQ conferences include the ACC, American Athletic Conference, Big XII, Big Ten, Pac-12, and SEC. The non-AQ conferences include Conference USA, MAC, Mountain West and Sun Belt.
Each AQ conference is guaranteed a spot for its conference champion, and along with that $23.9 million. That means Auburn, Baylor, Central Florida, Florida State, Michigan State, and Stanford each earned their respective conferences $23.9 million. Florida State and Auburn don’t receive any additional compensation from the BCS for playing in the national championship game.
Click here to read the rest of Kristi’s piece on The Motley Fool.
Manuela X. Mayo
December 14, 2013In an attempt to address so-called “bowl fatigue” (such as when a team plays in the state of Florida four times in five years), some conferences are shaking up their destinations. The Big Ten, for example, is adding bowls in New York and California. Meanwhile, the Big Ten, ACC and SEC are taking more control of the selection process. Rather than a traditional selection order (i.e. ACC No. 3, ACC No. 4, etc.), the leagues are grouping bowls into “pools” of three or four games with similar payouts. The goal is to produce matchups that are geographically sensible, avoid repeat trips by the same program and protect teams with impressive records from slipping farther down the lineup than deserved. Bowls within those pools may still pick in a predetermined order, but the conference will have final approval as to which team goes where.
Tod Carson
December 24, 2013There were 33 bowls played last year, not including the national championship game. At least 13 schools spent more to play in the game than their conferences received in compensation. According to figures from public universities where open-records laws apply, those losses totaled more than $3.8 million, even as taxpayer subsidies for athletic departments are on the rise and athletic programs are falling deeper in debt.