The BCS – A System Only Mickey Mouse Could Love

As the bowl season heads to its conclusion, we are 29 down and three to go. Two more “minor” bowls will be played this weekend, leading up to the BCS Championship Game.

So far, three of the four BCS games were blowouts, Kansas gets the Big 12 to
5-3 in bowls this year, while LSU and Ohio State meet in the BCS
title game Monday. Many fans aren’t sure they are the two best teams
at the end of the season.

And who can forget all the memorable highlights from all the
Poinsetta/Papajohns/Champs/Chick-fil-A/Insight bowls from the past
month?

So who is happy with the current bowl system?

For starters, a lot of the folks who participated in the 27 bowls not
directly involved in the BCS. The players get a holiday trip, school
presidents get an extra chance to hit alumni up for donations, coaches
get a bowl bonus, and host cities get to fill up hotel rooms with
visitors spending dollars elsewhere as well.

BCS teams, such as Arizona, Baylor, Northwestern and South Carolina
are happy with the system. Their conferences will cut them a seven
figure check out of the BCS bowl revenue, while they sit at home and
watch like the rest of us.

But the happiest of all over this system might be Mickey Mouse.

Mickey talks over past BCS glories with a couple of his favorite Musketeers

The Jan. 2006 BCS Championship game between Texas and USC set the mark
for BCS TV viewership, pulling in a 21.7 rating, the best for a
college game in almost 20 years. The other BCS games that year saw a
ratings increase of over 25%. Despite the upturn, ABC essentially told
the BCS “thanks, but no thanks,” when it came to bidding for future
BCS games.

ABC was paying $25 million each for the rights to the four BCS games,
and when they came up for renewal they only bid $17 million per game.
Fox stepped in and is paying $80 million for the four games they show
(Sugar, Orange, Fiesta, & championship game).

ABC did hold on to the Rose Bowl, and the “Grandaddy” of all bowl
games still is the major power broker in all of this. The Rose Bowl TV
contract with ABC is separate from the other BCS games. ABC is paying
$30 million a year to telecast the game through 2014. The Rose Bowl
retains its traditional broadcast spot on late afternoon on New Year’s
Day. The other bowls must rotate their broadcast time slots.
ABC/ESPN now have 23 of the 32 bowl games. That is over 70% of these
post-season games telecast by one company. And the bottom line for
Disney is that the lesser bowls deliver more bang for the buck.

These bowls are relatively cheap to buy and produce and they draw
enough viewers to keep sponsors happy. The ESPN bowls on average will
pull a larger audience than the ESPN regular season Major League
Baseball broadcasts. And the “Capital One Bowl Week” is a major
ratings pull for ESPN.

ABC claims they lost money on the BCS games, since they were paying
$100 million for the BCS games and just around $20 for the rights to
all the other minor bowls shown by Disney.

And it is probably true that the so-called minor bowls were
subsidizing the BCS games for ABC. Based on Total Gross Ratings
Points, the cheaper bowls returned more value for ABC/ESPN. Gross
Ratings Points (GRP’s) are used to estimate the reach (the number of
homes exposed to your media message over a specific period of time)
and the frequency (how many times your target audience will see your
message) of a media campaign. Media planners use Total Gross Ratings
Points as a method of creating a media buy in attempt to deliver a
maximum number of GRP’s at a minimum cost. For ABC/ESPN, the 19
cheaper bowls made up almost 60% of the total gross ratings points,
giving sponsors added value.

Disney not only dumped the BCS games, but they jumped into the Bowl
business as well. ESPN owns five bowl games: The Papajohns.com Bowl,
The New Mexico Bowl, The Pioneer Las Vegas Bowl, the Sheraton Hawaii
Bowl and the Bell Helicopter Armed Forces Bowl.

ESPN doesn’t pay any rights fees for those games, and they control all
the sponsor, ticket and marketing revenues produced by those bowls.

In 1997 there were 18 bowl games, now there are 32. TV’s desire
for live programming isn’t the only reason for this bloated schedule.
Aside from the TV networks, conference commissioners, host cities and
bowl bosses all have an interest in seeing that the bowl system does
not fade away.

This DVD is some of the player swag given out at the Roady’s Truck Stop Humanitarian Bowl.

The players get lots of gifts at the bowls, the conference
commissioners get the power of controlling who plays where, and help
set the bowl payouts. Cities who host bowl games often require that
the teams sell a certain amount of tickets and hotel rooms for the
game. And as the number of games increased, so did the need for more
and bigger payouts. According to a study by the San Diego
Union-Tribune, the bowls increased their net assets by 85% between
2001-05. That increase came thanks in part to television rights fees,
sponsorship and fundraising. All this chasing of the dollar has also
increased the compensation packages for the bowl game executives. The
same San Diego Union-Tribune report says that the compensation
packages for the bowl executives increased by 70% over the same
2001-05 time period.

Follow The Money

Everybody understands that a football play off would generate even
more money that is already out there. What keeps all sides from
working together is the question: Who Will Control All That Money?

The NCAA owns the collegiate post-season basketball tournament. Until
Larry Bird and Magic Johnson helped America discover March Madness, it
was simply another loss leader for the NCAA. Thanks to TV, it has
become a $6 billion cash cow for the NCAA, and they control where each
and every dollar ends up. The Bowls – especially the BCS Bowls – are
controlled by six conferences, and those conference commissioners do
not want to give away any of their power of the purse strings. They
worry that a playoff format would lower their revenue-generating and
more importantly revenue-distributing powers. Until all sides can
decide on who controls the distribution of the potential playoff funds
there will be no consensus on any extended format. We might see an
“and 1″ format, but any kind of 4-team or 8-team play off system is
not on the drawing board.

And of course there is the Big 10-Pac10-Rose Bowl troika that hosts
almost 36% of the tv sets in the US. Big 10 Commissioner Jim Delany has been
a vocal opponent to an extended playoff system. Delany worries that a
playoff would devalue the regular season, and shift some of the
multi-million dollar regular season contracts held by the six BCS
conferences to the post-season, where the non-BCS conferences would
battle for a bigger slice of the financial pie.

Disney certainly listens to Delany. Aside from the $200 million
contract that ABC has with the Rose Bowl, ESPN has a $100 million deal
to broadcast Big Ten football and basketball games. What about Fox?
Why wouldn’t they be willing to try and put together a post-season
package and play a game of chicken with the Pac10 – Big10 and threaten
to just hold it without them? Since Fox owns 49% of the Big Ten cable
network that is set to begin later this year, they have no desire to
take on that fight.

While we wait for the Allstate BCS Championship Game between Ohio St
and LSU next Monday night, we can sit back and enjoy the International
Bowl from Toronto featuring that classic match up of Rutgers vs. Ball
State. And don’t forget to tune in to the GMAC Bowl on Jan 6,
featuring those household names of Bowling Green vs. Tulsa.

Just don’t expect to see the Gameday crew giving serious consideration to a multi-team play off system.