December 28, 2004

College Bowl Scene Is Flush With Corporate Dollars

re you ready for the Outback Bowl - or would you prefer the Jackaroo Chops and Toowoomba Pasta from the steakhouse chain that the bowl is named for?

Perhaps you are aware that Wisconsin is playing Georgia in the Outback Bowl on Saturday in Tampa, Fla., and that the Badgers and the Bulldogs will be paid $2.75 million each.

Or maybe you know that the bowl began by paying the College Football Hall of Fame for the naming rights to the Hall of Fame Bowl.

O.K., it's not a hallowed history, and the Outback Bowl doesn't have a tradition dating to 1902. But it has a parade - yes, with floats - albeit one that is less magnificent and storied than the one in Pasadena with all those roses.

"There are 28 bowls, and people claw and scratch to distinguish themselves," said Jim McVay, president and chief executive of the Outback Bowl. "We've worked hard, had good community involvement and positioned ourselves as one of the top six bowl games in the country in terms of the teams we select and what we pay."

The 28-bowl postseason began Dec. 14 with the Wyndham New Orleans Bowl and will end Jan. 4, when Southern California and Oklahoma meet in the Orange Bowl (but not at the Orange Bowl) for the national championship.

Most of the attention and controversy are focused on the four bowls that make up the Bowl Championship Series: the Rose, the Orange, the Fiesta and the Sugar Bowls.

They pay their participating teams $11 million to $14 million each.

Beneath those games is an expanding world of other bowls, some that pay their teams as little as $750,000 (11 bowls, from the G.M.A.C. to the Emerald) and some that pay as much as $5.2 million (the Capital One, the former Citrus Bowl).

Twenty of the 28 games are carried by ESPN and ESPN2.

ESPN pays fees or splits revenue with the bowls to acquire the rights. Mark Shapiro, an ESPN executive vice president, said the games produced more than satisfactory ratings.

"A bowl signifies a payoff, a sense of satisfaction, a feeling of the big prize," Shapiro said. "There's clearly an appetite that grows each year; we're feeding that frenzy."

He added that "it's not a watered-down product when you can get a 1.5 rating for a pairing of 6-5 teams in early December; that's astonishing."

Last season, the Outback Bowl generated a 4.5 cable rating (or four million TV households), the second highest on ESPN or ESPN2 after the Holiday Bowl. This week of bowls is ESPN's highest rated of the year.

In many ways, all bowls are civic enterprises designed to put the best face on the cities where they are played. There are parades, festivals, pageants, golf and tennis tournaments, team outings and other sponsored events. The Outback Bowl stages 20 promotional events starting in the summer; the Rose Bowl has 32 committees meeting year-round to plan events that begin in September with the choosing of the Rose Queen and her royal court.

"Our mission statement is simple," McVay said of the Outback Bowl. "We're out to create an economic impact in the Tampa Bay area and to positively showcase our community nationally and internationally."

Just a few years into the Hall of Fame Bowl's start in 1986, it was deeply in debt, and its local banker refused to lend it more money, McVay said. In 1996, the title sponsorship was purchased by Outback Steakhouse, which did not want to retain the Hall of Fame name. The chain's executives did not want the news media leaving off its name - as they usually do with FedEx, Tostitos and Nokia, the title sponsors of the Orange, Fiesta and Sugar Bowls - when referring to the game.

That choice is echoed in bowls named for Champs Sports (the ex-Tangerine Bowl) and MPC Computers (the former Humanitarian Bowl) but not in the (EV1.net) Houston Bowl or the (Pacific Life) Holiday Bowl.

"This would never have been the Outback Hall of Fame Bowl," McVay said.

As with most bowls, the Outback's parent, the Tampa Bay Bowl Association, is a nonprofit organization that files returns with the Internal Revenue Service. According to its filing for the fiscal year that ended Jan. 31, its revenue totaled $8.8 million, and it posted an excess of $604,126.

Among its sources of game revenue, tickets produced the most, $3.4 million, followed by ESPN's broadcast rights fee of $2.1 million and Outback's $1 million payment for its sponsorship, which has one more year to run. Radio rights brought in only $24,500. Most of the revenue was spent to pay the teams in last year's game, Iowa and Florida, $2.65 million each. Social functions ($579,472), game-day expenses ($443,056) and advertising ($169,435) were some of the other costs.

The bowl's revenue has grown 75 percent since its 1997 filing, while McVay's salary has swelled by 156 percent to $498,336, making him the highest-paid bowl game executive - better compensated than the heads of much larger nonprofits like Goodwill Industries International, the American Heart Association, United Jewish Communities and the American Red Cross.

John Junker, who runs the Fiesta and Insight Bowls, is ranked second in salaries among top bowl game executives, at $346,058.

McVay said he negotiated the television and title sponsorship directly, saving the bowl from paying an outside consultant $450,000 to make the deals.

"It's a specialized job with a certain skill set," said McVay, who is in his 17th season. "We're saving money the way we do it. The other guys don't do the same thing."

Mitch Dorger, chief executive of the Tournament of Roses Association, which runs the Rose Bowl, earned $192,201 in the fiscal year that ended April 30, 2003. He is part of a management committee that negotiated ABC's rights fees ($26 million this year, he said). The network sells the title and presenting sponsorships for the B.C.S. bowls, and keeps the money from Citicorp so that the game can be "presented by Citi."