The bowls runneth over

At every bowl I've ever been to, you always hear the coaches and players talk about how well they're treated.

The bowls tend to roll out the red carpet to make the participants feel special. Just last January, it was an amazing sight watching Clemson's caravan go to and from Orange Bowl practice with an escort of something like 343 police on motorcycles, blaring sirens and all.

You feel like a king if you're a coach or player, but if you're an athletics director or bean counter you're probably a little queasy watching the process unfold. Because you know this royal scam, er, treatment comes at a high cost.

When you read this piece of excellent reporting by Dan Wetzel from Yahoo/Rivals, you begin to understand why all the bowl executives are always smiling as if they're on some sort of drug.

Because, well, they are on some sort of drug. It's called money. Loads and loads of it.

Check this out:

Officially the document carries the label "2012 BCS Complimentary Tickets," but for LSU it looks more like the StubHub order from hell, nothing complimentary about it.

Two tickets for the school president to the BCS title game? That's $700. Four for the chancellor? That's $1,400. Les Miles' family? Three-fifty a pop. On and on it goes.

One of the dirty secrets of many bowl games is that almost nothing is cheap. The industry, in this case represented by Sugar Bowl Inc., long ago learned how to squeeze every last penny out of college football. That includes charging even the stars of the show exorbitant prices for tickets.

How about a couple of free ones for the players to give to their parents or girlfriends or high school coaches? Please. The Sugar Bowl instead charged LSU $350 a seat, full price, for every last player request. Total cost: $254,800 on the players alone.

Oh, and the Tiger Marching Band, the one that is contractually obligated to attend bowl week and provide halftime entertainment? With bowls, not even the band gets in free. LSU had to buy tickets for every clarinetist, flutist, tuba player and majorette. Some of the seats, according to the Baton Rouge Advocate, just held the tuba.

That added up to 529 tickets, almost all full price. The bill for the student band to sit was $182,830.

That's $182,830 to get into a venue and give a free show to all the other paying customers.

The bowl system is a joke, largely because people who defend it in the name of preserving the "meaning" of a regular season cannot logically reconcile the fact that most of the bowls are utterly meaningless.

For so long we've heard presidents and conference commissioners speak of an "NFL-style playoff system" as if it's some sort of apocalypse, despite the fact that the NFL-style playoff system actually works quite well -- well enough that the method of higher-seeded teams playing host to playoff games is something the college honchos appear to be looking at closely.

The bowl system, for whatever reason, still has teams showing up at least a week before the actual game. As Wetzel shows, the bowls profit handsomely off this arrangement by working deals with hotels that charge insane rates for teams and their entourages.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but don't NFL visiting teams arrive at their playoff destinations a day or two before the game? Heck, the Super Bowl is infinitely bigger than college football's (mythical) championship game and still the participating players aren't in the host town as long as the 6-6 teams playing in the Poulan Weedeater Bowl brought to you by Meineke Mufflers.

The beauty of the current changes being explored for college football's postseason is that everything is coming home to roost. Athletics directors have enough headaches to deal with in the form of money spent on facilities, coaches' salaries and the skyrocketing cost of tuition. Sounds like some of them are justifiably ready to dam up the river of cash that flows to these bowl games in the name of propping up some tourism industry 600 miles away.

"When did our job as a university become supporting the hospitality industry in certain states?" West Virginia athletic director Oliver Luck said last year. "Football is an economic engine at every Division I school. You need a strong and successful football program to pay the bills. We have a limited number of games. When we put the Mountaineer football team on the field, it has to be a profit center."

There will always be greed and profiteering and corruption no matter the system. But some of the stuff exposed in this article makes it hard to defend the current system.

They say the bowls are great because they're a reward for the players. The real rewards are pocketed by the bowls and the hotels, and almost all of it is on the schools' dime.

LW