In Football, the Have-Nots Clash With the Haves

By WELCH SUGGS

In big-time college football, it's not whether you win or lose. It's not how you play the game, either.

It's whom you play that counts.

The University of Colorado at Boulder, for example, competes in the Big 12 Conference. As a result, the Buffaloes football team will earn somewhere north of $25-million this season, despite entering the year ranked as low as 37th in various national polls.

The Buffaloes' upstate rivals from Colorado State University, in Fort Collins, begin the season ranked in the country's top 25. But the Rams will be lucky to break even, with earnings of only $2.8-million.

The Big 12 is the big time. Colorado State belongs to the second-tier Mountain West Conference. Both athletics programs are in much better shape than the one at the University of Idaho, which claims to be playing at the same level as the Buffaloes and the Rams. However, the Vandals football program will spend $4-million more than it brings in, with the university's general budget making up the shortfall.

All three universities belong to Division I-A of the National Collegiate Athletic Association. But only Boulder's Buffaloes get the big bucks, only the Buffaloes truly have a shot at a national football championship, and only the Buffaloes get the public attention that comes from playing big-time sports.

The financial disparities among the three programs illustrate the deep divide between haves and have-nots in Division I-A. Members of the Big 12 and the five other leagues in the Bowl Championship Series receive almost all bowl bids, television contracts, and consequent publicity. Presidents of colleges in other leagues are tired of being shut out -- particularly given the large sums that universities and state legislatures have to pay to keep athletics departments at universities like Colorado State and Idaho in business.

As bowl contracts are being renegotiated, the left-out presidents, led by Scott Cowen, of Tulane University, are arguing that they should be included in the new deals. A hearing is scheduled before a Congressional committee this month, and Mr. Cowen has discussed taking the matter to court.

He would not have an easy case to make. Conference commissioners and athletics directors in the big-time conferences argue that they have merely been favored in an open marketplace, and that they came by their wealth and visibility long before they created the Bowl Championship Series, in partnership with the four biggest bowl games and ABC Sports.

"Nothing's changed over last 20 years," says Tim Weiser, a former Colorado State athletics director who is now at big-time Kansas State University. "Tulane's had the same opportunities Michigan's had, but Michigan has more appeal for the TV networks, with the households they bring."

Sharp Divide

The University of Michigan at Ann Arbor and the University of Colorado at Boulder are among the 63 colleges belonging to the Bowl Championship Series. The series matches teams from the Atlantic Coast, Big East, Big Ten, Big 12, Pacific-10, and Southeastern Conferences in the Fiesta, Orange, Sugar, and Rose Bowls to determine a national football champion.

Each conference champion gets a slot in a bowl game. Two at-large spots make it theoretically possible for a Colorado State or even an Idaho to play its way into one of the four bowls. However, a team's "strength of schedule" -- the winning records of its opponents and its opponents' opponents -- counts heavily in the BCS rankings, so teams from weaker leagues, like the Mountain West, Sun Belt, Conference USA, and Western Athletic Conference have only the longest of shots.

Membership in the BCS means much more than access to the elite bowl games. The six participating leagues also have contracts with other bowl games, not to mention lucrative deals to televise regular-season football and basketball games.

In all, Colorado will make nearly $9-million from belonging to the Big 12 this year. Colorado State will receive only $1.7-million from the Mountain West Conference, while the Sun Belt Conference will transfer a paltry $284,000 to Idaho.

That flow of income enables the haves to protect their investments and make even more money from other sources, unlike the have-nots.

At Colorado, the university has added suites and expensive club seats to turn the football stadium, Folsom Field, into a cash machine. In 2003-4, the football team is expected to generate $12.8-million in gate receipts and other revenue, while costing only a little over $7-million. Even if the team had to carry all of the athletics department's capital debt, the football team on its own would still turn a profit of $800,000.

Money from those sources allows the athletics department to lavish money on other areas as well. Marketing, promotions, media relations, and other ways of reaching the public will cost $2.8-million this year. An additional $2.6-million will cover sports medicine, academic services for athletes, strength and conditioning programs, and the monitoring of compliance with NCAA rules.

Even with all its revenue, Colorado's athletics department still doesn't turn a profit. Student fees account for $1.4-million in athletics revenue. An additional $967,000 comes from the university itself, to help pay for out-of-state athletics scholarships.

At Colorado State, however, the university as a whole is underwriting even more of the athletics department's operations: about 33 percent in all. Student fees account for $2.4-million of the department's revenue, and the university will kick in another $2.4-million from general funds. Colorado State's total revenues are budgeted at $14.5-million, less than half of Colorado's $35.4-million.

Across the board, spending on sports and other athletics-department operations at Colorado State usually lags by a third to a half behind that of its rivals. "Olympic" sports -- those other than football and basketball -- have an average budget of $174,000 per sport at Colorado State, while those at Colorado cost more than half a million dollars each, on average.

When it comes to tutors, equipment, sports medicine, and other support services, the Buffaloes in Boulder have much greater resources than the Rams in Fort Collins, making its programs much more attractive for blue-chip recruits and enabling the Buffaloes' athletics department to take care of players' every need.

But Colorado State has remained competitive. Mr. Weiser, who was the Rams' athletics director for four years before moving to Kansas State in 2001, still takes great pride in that fact.

"Colorado State is not only surviving but thriving," he says, noting that the Rams have beaten the Buffaloes in football for the past two years. "It's hard for me to suggest that they can't survive just by doing what they have been doing."

However, the Rams' facilities are not up to Kansas State's, he adds, a disparity that "you'd find pretty consistently across the board in non-BCS schools."

New Kids on the Field

Neither Colorado nor Colorado State will have any difficulty meeting rules for Division I-A membership that will go into effect next year.

The rules will require all 117 members to average more than 15,000 fans per football game; to play 5 home games against Division I-A opponents; to field 16 teams, including at least 8 women's squads; and to give out a particular number or value of athletics scholarships.

Idaho, however, is one of a score of colleges that will have trouble attracting enough fans and opponents to retain its membership.

Last year, Idaho averaged only 10,152 fans in four Division I-A home games, en route to a record of 2 wins and 10 losses. Just four home games against I-A opponents are on the schedule for this season, and Idaho has only 15 teams competing this year, so the university is one home football game and one team short of what it needs to meet the new requirements.

Idaho, which is spending only $133,000 per Olympic sport in 2003-4, expects to generate only about $4-million in outside revenue. The rest of the Vandals' $8-million budget will be financed by a $1.9-million state appropriation, $1.7-million in student fees, and $550,000 from the university's general fund.

Legislators and the state Board of Education have not been happy about spending so much money on athletics, particularly with budget crises facing both the state and the university. Board members have criticized university officials for spending additional money on sports when the university itself faces a $5-million operating deficit.

Trust Busting

The question facing Bowl Champion-ship Series officials -- and potentially Congress, in the House of Representatives' Judiciary Committee hearing -- is whether the disparities among the conferences constitute a violation of antitrust statutes.

Mr. Weiser says not. Some colleges have enough fans and drawing power on television to make them attractive candidates for the bowl matchups, and some do not, the Kansas State athletics director says. "Colorado State has just-as-passionate fans as Kansas State," he says. "The difference is that Kansas State has three times as many of those passionate fans as Colorado State does."

He adds: "There's nobody saying to Tulane, SMU, and others that they can't be on television," he says. "That's a choice that the networks are making, because they believe their advertisers are saying they need [other teams on television] to appeal to a vast network audience."

On the other side, the argument from Mr. Cowen, Tulane's president, and others is that the bowl arrangement constitutes a cabal or a "group boycott," in which one group of competitors agrees to squeeze other competitors out of a given market. Tulane's Web site links to an article written by a Brigham Young University law student who argues that the BCS is both a "horizontal" monopoly of competitors and a "vertical" monopoly of television networks, the bowls, and conferences that unfairly excludes non-BCS institutions.

Gary Roberts, a professor of sports law at Tulane who testified at the last Congressional hearings on the subject, in 1997, explains the problem this way: Under the Sherman Antitrust Act, plaintiffs would have to prove that the BCS arrangement has an anticompetitive effect. It does, Mr. Roberts says: Many teams are effectively excluded from competing in the national-championship game. Defendants could then argue that creating such a wildly popular game outweighs the unfairness of excluding teams. Plaintiffs, for their part, could argue that a fairer system, like a playoff, could accomplish the same goal without excluding anybody.

Bowl Championship Series officials argue that because the marketplace has selected the participating teams, the championship

series is simply the most efficient arrangement to match the top two teams.

That's true, Mr. Roberts says, but "because General Motors was the predominant auto producer in the 1950s, does that mean they had the right to drive everyone else out of business and not every let anyone else into the industry?"

The second-class status to which many colleges have been relegated, the professor says, "makes it impossible to recruit the quality of athletes and coaches they need to compete."

Old Discussions

The interesting wrinkle now is that the colleges in the elite conferences need the other Division I-A institutions to fill out their schedules. The first two to four games for most big-time powers are against the Idahos of the world, and the big-timers typically pay the cannon-fodder teams $150,000 to $500,000 to show up. This season, Idaho will make $890,000 from playing three BCS colleges.

Wright Waters, commissioner of the Sun Belt Conference, says that his counterparts in the higher-profile leagues have expressed concern about the health of Division I-A football as a whole, and may be more willing to hear his concerns: His conference members need the richer colleges to extend a hand.

Primarily, he says, the richer colleges should help the little guys out by playing on their home fields every once in a while, to give them a chance to get the five home games they need, as well as bigger crowds than usual.

According to Mr. Roberts, the BCS's hegemony over college sports threatens more than the finances of smaller Division I-A members.

"College sports is not supposed to be simply another type of entertainment business," the law professor says. It's supposed "to provide young men and women an opportunity to mature, learn, develop skills and values that will carry them through their adult lives. One of the dimensions of that goal is to maximize opportunities for young men and women, and if you create a cartel that essentially drives half of your schools out of business, you're not maximizing opportunities for kids."

Fans and the public at large expect colleges to behave fairly and to promote as many opportunities for athletes as possible, says Mr. Roberts. If athletics departments persist in acting like businesses, he warns, then the courts and the public will treat them like businesses, forcing them to pay their athletes as employees and to pay taxes and other business expenses.

That would cost any athletics department much more than it can afford, he says.