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Morris: Trend of paying for games is escalating
Posted on 09.07.08
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The paydays
Payouts for South Carolina schools who scheduled “guarantee” games on opponents’ home fields this football season:The Citadel
| Opponent | Payout |
| Clemson | $235,000 |
| Florida | $450,000 |
| Total | $685,000 |
| Opponent | Payout |
| Central Florida | $250,000 |
| Clemson | $235,000 |
| Total | $485,000 |
| Opponent | Payout |
| Penn State | $450,000 |
| Opponent | Payout |
| Miami | $400,000 |
| Opponent | Payout |
| Virginia Tech | $275,000 |
| Opponent | Payout |
| USC | $230,000 |
-------------------------
USC and ClemsonPayouts made by South Carolina and Clemson to host nonconference opponents
USC| Opponent | Payout |
| N.C. State | $200,000 |
| Wofford | $230,000 |
| Alabama-Birmingham | $750,000 |
| Total | $1,180,000 |
| Opponent | Payout |
| The Citadel | $235,000 |
| S.C. State | $235,000 |
| USC | $250,000 |
| Total | $720,000 |
College football’s guarantee games have evolved into a fascinating high-stakes roulette that includes payouts, buyouts, two-for-one deals, three-for-one deals and even-money splits.
If poker can be a television sport, can the game played in back rooms across the country between athletics directors and their associates be far behind?
There is enough intrigue to merit interest from college football fans. Consider that prices for “guarantee” games have escalated from the $100,000-$200,000 range of a decade ago to the $1.4 million Ohio State will pay to beat Navy’s brains in next season. At the same time, smaller schools are beginning to shirk their responsibility in these deals; evidence being Appalachian State, which accepted $400,000 a season ago from Michigan and defeated the Wolverines.
“It’s become a no-win situation,” says Robert Zullo, an assistant professor in the sports management program at James Madison University who has been studying guarantee games for the past five years.
“The prices are jumping up faster than anyone can keep up with. It’s like coaches’ salaries,” Zullo says, speaking from the perspective of BCS schools. “It’s nice that the smaller schools are getting additional money. You are happy for schools like Bowling Green. But, at the same time, that is money you could have used for your swimming program or your tennis program or your golf program.”
Athletics directors at BCS schools are juggling a lot of interests when it comes to nonconference scheduling. With the addition of a 12th regular-season game for 2006, most BCS schools play four non-conference games. Many schools count a rivalry game among those four. Most would prefer to play either a high-profile opponent or a team that has regional appeal.
That leaves two other games to schedule. Schools in the SEC, for example, would prefer to schedule a couple of home games in which they stand a good chance of winning while pulling in big dollars for playing in a full stadium. No athletics director wants to over-schedule by playing too many difficult nonconference opponents, yet he or she wants to schedule games that are appealing to the fan base.
“If you’re an athletic director, you can schedule a lighter team and people are still going to be there,” Zullo says. “They’re still going to buy concessions. They will still be parking their cars. But there may be some no shows.”
Schools such as USC and Clemson rake in between $2 million and $2.5 million for a home game, regardless of the opponent. So, the lower the guarantee paid to an opponent, the higher the profit margin.
The USC and Clemson nonconference schedules this season show how the guarantee game has worked for those two schools.
USC plays at Clemson this season, so Clemson will pay USC the standard $250,000 agreed upon by the two schools. USC will pay the same to Clemson when the game returns to Columbia in 2009. For the other three nonconference games, the schools have adopted similar philosophies in scheduling.
Both plan to play an in-state Football Championship Subdivision opponent each season, alternating games between Wofford, S.C. State, The Citadel and Furman. USC is paying Wofford $230,000 this season, and Clemson is paying The Citadel and S.C. State $235,000 each.
Prior to 2006, when the NCAA expanded regular seasons to include a 12th game, victories against FCS schools did not count toward a team’s bowl eligibility. Now that they do count, schools have been racing to find an FCS opponent each season.
“Why pay outlandish guarantees when you can keep the money in state?” says Eric Hyman, USC’s athletics director.
The in-state FCS schools are thrilled at the prospect of playing at USC and at Clemson. Buddy Pough, S.C. State’s coach, will forever be grateful to USC in 2007. Not only did his team make a respectable showing in a 38-3 loss, it also used its paycheck from USC to build a new weight room.
For a school such as Wofford, which will play at Williams-Brice Stadium on Sept. 20, the $230,000 guarantee covers a nice chunk of its $2.7 annual football budget. Charleston Southern’s $400,000 payment for playing at Miami on Aug. 30 was nearly one-fifth of its $2.5 million football budget.
Of course, FCS schools occasionally can jump up and bite the big boys, as Appalachian State did to Michigan and Montana did to Colorado in 2006 after collecting a $275,000 paycheck. Appalachian State coach Jerry Moore has begun calling these matchups “opportunity games” for FCS schools.
Neither Clemson nor USC ever wants to play two FCS opponents in any one season. Clemson, in larger part to a couple of broken contracts, was forced to do that this season. It defeated The Citadel on Saturday and plays S.C. State on Sept. 20.
“The reality is, you ask some of the folks around here and I think many of them would say there is not much difference in playing a I-AA opponent and a mid-major,” says Kyle Young, Clemson’s assistant athletics director in charge of football scheduling. “You don’t want two of them in one season, and it’s not something that we wanted to do.”
The Citadel is among five FCS schools playing two games this season against BCS opponents. Chattanooga is the big winner in “opportunity games” because it will bring in $935,000 total from games played at Oklahoma and at Florida State.
That Clemson ended up playing The Citadel and S.C. State in the same season represents an excellent illustration of the complexities of scheduling. Schools such as USC and Clemson want seven home games each season. Much of the revenue generated in those home games supports the entire athletics program at each school.
Nonconference schedules generally are set five and six years ahead. Late last season, Clemson still had Central Florida and Louisiana Tech scheduled for this season. Clemson was to pay Central Florida $400,000 for a single game on Sept. 13. It was to play Louisiana Tech in Shreveport this season as part of a three-year deal. Louisiana Tech played at Clemson in 2006 and was scheduled to do the same in 2009.
Central Florida called first and said it wanted out of its contract. Louisiana Tech then called and said it wanted to cancel the remaining two games in its contract with Clemson.
About the time of Central Florida’s call, the Chick-fil-A Bowl was organizing a season-opening game in Atlanta and wanted to pair an ACC team against an SEC team. The timing was perfect for Clemson, which earned $1.9 million from the game on Aug. 30, or about the same amount Clemson would have realized by playing Central Florida at home.
Finding a replacement game for Louisiana Tech was much more difficult.
“I couldn’t find one, anywhere,” Young says. “We were offering a substantial guarantee, one that was well within the market range, which is probably close to $800,000.”
At one point, Young believed he had a mid-major school on the hook. Then the athletics director from that school called to say the pending contract with Clemson hinged on his team’s game that weekend.
“If we win this game tonight, then I can do it,” Young recalls the athletics director saying. “If we lose, I can’t do it because my coach is going to be on the hot seat next year and I can’t do that to him.”
Young says he does not want to divulge the school, but he does remember watching the game on an Internet game-tracker and cheering madly for that school. It lost, and Young was left with having to line up another FCS opponent, in this case S.C. State.
Beyond the annual in-state FCS game, USC and Clemson have other similar ideas in nonconference scheduling.
“Philosophically, what I would like to do is play a regional rival, like a North Carolina, North Carolina State, East Carolina,” says Eric Hyman, USC’s athletics director. “Then I would like to play a team that maybe you have a better than 50-50 chance of being successful against.
“A big reason for that is how difficult this league is. The (SEC) is so difficult. I know there are some people who want to play Michigan. They want to play Southern Cal. It doesn’t make a lot of economic sense to do it, plus it would put too much of a burden on the coaches.”
USC played at North Carolina in 2007 and will get a return game in 2010. USC played host to N.C. State on Aug. 28 and will open the 2009 season at N.C. State.
Additionally, USC was scheduled to begin a six-game series against East Carolina this season at Williams-Brice Stadium. Last fall, ECU said it wanted out of the first year of the contract because it had accepted a higher-paying game against Virginia Tech in Charlotte.
That was OK with USC, with a couple of provisions. First, ECU was required to help USC find a suitable replacement. Also, ECU was required to pick up some of the guarantee paid to the new USC opponent.
In the end, ECU helped USC find UAB. If that is too many acronyms for you, stay with me. USC will pay UAB $750,000 up front for visiting Columbia on Sept. 27. In 2011, when USC and ECU play in Charlotte, ECU will pay USC $250,000, plus $50,000 in interest to help offset the 2008 payment to UAB.
The remainder of the USC-ECU series remains the same with a split of gate receipts for games played in Charlotte in 2011 and 2014. ECU will receive a $500,000 guarantee for playing in Charlotte in 2012 and $250,000 for playing here in 2016. USC will play the only game in Greenville, N.C., in 2015 and will receive a $250,000 guarantee.
While UAB came out the biggest winner in the deal, its huge guarantee is not among the highest paid this season or in college football history. Florida Atlantic received $900,000 for playing at Texas, and Arkansas paid Tulsa $850,000 this season.
The biggest payout by a long shot was the $2.1 million that Wyoming collected in 2002 for playing Tennessee in Nashville. Wyoming played at Tennessee in 1999 and will do the same on Nov. 8 this season. The teams’ original contract called for Tennessee to play in 2002 at 30,000-seat War Memorial Stadium in Laramie, Wyo.
The two schools were approached by the Nashville Sports Authority, which offered to give each athletics department more than $2 million to play at 69,000-seat LP Field. Tennessee essentially had a home game, even though Wyoming wore home uniforms, and Wyoming used the money to supplement its operating budget for nearly four years.
Other sweetheart deals have transpired over the years, including one that Hyman remembers from his days as athletics director at Miami of Ohio in 1997.
Miami was scheduled to collect a $250,000 guarantee for opening that season at Notre Dame. Miami fans were ecstatic about playing Notre Dame, but NBC had other ideas. The TV network wanted a higher-profile game to open the season and asked Notre Dame to replace Miami with a bigger-name opponent, which turned out to be Georgia Tech.
“Do you want to get me fired?” Hyman recalls telling the Notre Dame athletics director. “I can’t do that.”
Hyman also understood he held all the cards and negotiated a buyout of the contract. In the buyout, Notre Dame paid Miami the $250,000 guarantee. It also agreed to play Miami a four-game, home-and-home series in men’s basketball, and to play Miami in all other sports over a four-year period.
As fate would have it, Miami defeated Notre Dame in three of the four basketball meetings. Additionally, Miami found Virginia Tech as a replacement opponent in football. Miami received an additional $250,000 guarantee for that game, and upset 12th-ranked Virginia Tech, which entered the game with a 4-0 record and 13-game home winning streak.
“I was living right,” Hyman says with a laugh. “There is no question about it. It worked out real well for us.”
Hyman’s position in those negotiations with Notre Dame are precisely where many mid-major schools find themselves these days when dealing with BCS schools for guarantee games.
“In the past, you might give someone a guarantee of $150,000 to $200,000,” Zullo says. “You’d schedule a Louisiana-Monroe, Louisiana-Lafayette, Ball State. You didn’t want to play Marshall or Southern Miss because they could come up and beat you.
“So, athletics directors began calling Temple, and the price went up to $500,000. Then, once a school like Ball State heard a school was paying that much, they would ask for $750,000.”
Hyman says the escalating guarantees are reaching the point of “diminishing returns.” To counter those numbers, BCS schools are beginning to accept two-for-one and three-for-one deals with mid-major schools. Those agreements call for two games played at a BCS school with the promise of one game played at the mid-major school.
That was evident this past weekend when Maryland played at Middle Tennessee, West Virginia at East Carolina, Texas at Texas-El Paso, Texas A&M at New Mexico, Texas Tech at Nevada and Minnesota at Bowling Green.
To counter the mid-majors’ newfound power in negotiating contracts, five of the six BCS conferences are considering the inclusion of more league games each season. The Pacific-10 Conference already plays nine league games. The others are considering the move from eight to nine conference games.
Such a move would eliminate one game for BCS schools against mid-major opponents. It also would diminish the guarantee games being played behind athletics department doors these days.
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