NCAA FootballSports & Politics

Here’s How Much Money Some Small Colleges Make To Get Embarrassed In Football

College football is a money-making enterprise, as everyone knows. And while the bowl system is the main proprietor of such non-finnancial equity, both in relation to other college sports, its athletes and smaller institutions, there are levels of legal corruption as well. Namely, small colleges playing big schools in the early non-conference schedule where the result is hardly in doubt even before kickoff.

Take Oklahoma State’s drubbing of Savannah State last week, 84-0. Oklahoma State head coach Mike Gundy had to defend his Cowboys against running up the score, because, as he put it on XTRA Sports 910 in Phoenix:

“We tried to manufacture a way to huddle up and use the clock and break out at a certain time and then just ran the same plays, basically, over and over and over. We ended up scoring and really not even attempting to.”

On some level, he’s probably not lying. He can’t just have his players kneel the ball for two straight quarters, and to tell them not to try is even more embarrassing. The bigger question, of course, is why they even have these lopsided matchups in the first place, and the answer is money. Some may point to the Appalachian State over Michigan upset from a few years ago as a chance for smaller schools to earn their stripes on the national stage, but that upset was an aberration in the longstanding tradition of big schools laying the smack down on smaller schools early in the college football season.

We already knew that smaller schools received money on behalf of their bruised egos, but the dollar amounts are really getting up there. Here’s a brief sampling of how much each fooball powerhouse paid their less profitbale and successful underlings, via Darren Rovell:

Oklahoma State vs. Savannah State (Week 1, 84-0): $385,000
Florida State vs. Murray State (Week 1, 69-3): $450,000
Pittsburgh vs. Youngstown State (Week 1, 31-17 – UPSET!): 400,000
Florida State vs. Savannah State (Week 2): $475,000
Oklahoma vs. Florida A&M (Week 2): $650,000
Alabama vs. Western Kentucky (Week 2): $1,000,000
Arkansas vs. Louisiana-Monroe (Week 2): $500,000 – part of $3,000,000, six-game deal
Virginia Tech vs. Austin Peay (Week 2): $318,750
Tennessee vs. Georgia State (Week 2): $500,000

Those are some large chunks of change, by my count. From the perspective of the small school, such as Savannah State, which will have earned $860,000 from six hours of misery, such large profits must be understood within the context of the profitability of their football program as a whole – it made $874 last year. Dollars. So swallowing a few non-conference punches in the mouth is ultimately worth it to keep their program afloat. Schools like Alabama, meanwhile, are shelling out $1 million for the chance to stomp all over some unnamed small school. Why would they do this, you might ask? That’s a pretty expensive tuneup when they could just a play a crappy Big Six conference school for a less hefty price. Then again, what’s $1 million when your football program’s total revenue profit (Alabama’s) was $45.3 million in 2010-2011?

Although the backwards system keeps small school athletics afloat, it begs a bigger question – one that we’ve wrestled with for years now. Do college football programs really need $45.3 million in profit? Can’t that money be handed down to say, it’s players, or put into some sort of shared revenue pool to keep struggling programs alive?

h/t Darren Rovell

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