Breaking down the sliding payout scale

A change in how bowl payouts work

Bowl games guaranteed every participating team at least $750,000 for its involvement. This, however, has changed.

“About 1992 it kind of leveled off at $750,000 and stayed that way for 12 or 13 years,” said Glen Krupica, NIU Deputy Athletics Director of External Affairs. “The NCAA, ever since they lost the lawsuit with the part-time assistant basketball coaches, is defiantly afraid of anti-trust. Therefore it became pretty easy to establish a bowl game in a different number of communities. You draw that mentality even further, and now you have games where there is almost a sliding scale.”

According to Krupica, who from 1994-2005 was the Executive Director of the Independence Bowl Foundation, there are now privately owned bowl games. Some of these games, such as the Bell Helicopters Armed Forces Bowl, Papajohns.com Bowl, Pioneer Las Vegas Bowl and Sheraton Hawai’i Bowl are owned by TV networks. In the cases of these four games they are all owned by ESPN.

Other bowl games are now in the hands of private investors, like the Texas Bowl. The Texas Bowl, according to Krupica, is actually owned by a group of investors in the Houston Texans organization. This explains the location of the game, and why it is the only bowl game televised through the NFL Network.

The issue with these private bowls, as Krupica explained, is they do not guarantee what a participating team will receive for its payout.

“There are some games that are owned by private entities where you might not know what the payout and the ticket arrangement is until you actually get in the thing,” Krupica said. ”It’s a whole different game. It’s changed the game a lot, and I’m not sure it’s for the better. Going in you want to know what you’re going to make out of it and what you’re going to spend, and tickets is a big part of that.”


Continue reading this story by clicking on part four.

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