NCAA Football Report (Bowl Week 2)
The Bowl season is moving to the big schools next week when the New Year’s Six Bowls that include the CFP semi-finals will become the focus of college football.
Major schools get their shot to take home a bowl and add to a great history of winning that usually include national championships and plenty of bowl wins.
That is not the case for every team that participates in bowl season as this time of year features some of the smaller schools that not many people hear about throughout the season.
Schools like Northern Illinois, Akron, Bowling Green, and Middle Tennessee are all put on the national stage.
That is one of the biggest and most important aspects of the bowl system in the NCAA as more teams get to enter that big stage.
These teams are all a part of the Division I-FBS and they are constantly competing against teams like Notre Dame, Alabama, Oklahoma, Ohio State, Michigan, Michigan State, and any other massive football program.
They enter every season fighting a losing battle as some of these teams make hundreds of millions of dollars every year.
They have the money to pay the best coaches and create the best facilities while also have the exposure on national TV almost every week.
Every one of those aspects become massive recruiting fodder to get the best high school players to come to their school.
These smaller schools have to get a little more creative with their recruiting as they can’t compete with the big schools.
They try to highlight their education or the system a young coach has established or even the relation to a recruit’s home town that can keep them close to their family.
It is a tougher spot but they can get ahead a little when they begin to talk about their ability to make bowl games year after year.
It is a major selling point as many of these smaller schools do not get the five or even four-star recruits.
Instead they are trying to get those three star recruits who might be able to make the NFL but are far from guarantees.
A bowl game means major exposure for those players and that schools as they are featured on at least ESPN throughout North America.
There are also more scouts attending these games than most other games giving players a chance to show what they have in a big game.
If a small school can continue to go to bowl games and continue to win they immediately get the upper hand on other small schools that they have to compete with.
They can say to a new recruit that they will likely get to play in a big game every year of eligibility and for a lot of players that is a big plus for a school.
Of course the bowl system is far from perfect though as there can be many more problems that make attending a bowl barely worth the exposure.
It is another strange part of the NCAA system where bowls are a big plus for a team and most need to go in order to solidify a recruiting class but a bowl has plenty of drawbacks.
The biggest is possibly the cost of attending a bowl game that can be a major hindrance to a smaller school with a smaller budget.
Winning a bowl will bring money to a school with a winning payout for every bowl. The problem is that the cost of attending a game might not be matched by the amount the team has to pay just to attend the game.
Then there are the losing teams who pay the same money to attend a game but get nothing for attending that game.
Bowl organizations are responsible for the winner payout but they are responsible for little else during the festivities.
Schools need to pay to fly to the city of the bowl game, including some that are not even in the country like the Bahamas Bowl.
Schools also need to pay for lodging, food, and outings that are traditional during bowl weeks.
That can all add up to a lot of money for a school that doesn’t bring in the money that the major schools can bring in every year.
When they attend a bowl and don’t get any payout that is a major loss for a program that spent a lot of money and has nothing to show for it.
Not every bowl is like this but in the last two weeks there were more bowls with small payouts than there will be in the coming days.
These are bowls that rarely sell many tickets and often lose money themselves but they still run on the purpose of exposing small schools to the public.
That is the perfect expression of what the NCAA has been about for many years as the finances rarely make much sense.
Big schools make a lot of money and yet some of their players are starving and sleeping on couches unable to afford to live.
Bowl games lose money every year and yet they continue to be hosted despite the fact that everyone knows that they are going to lose money.
The NCAA does all of these things for the benefit of their member schools, or at least that is what they say.
More often it is for the benefit of executives and officials who get large salaries thanks to big TV deals and marketing revenue.
Bowl executives tend to fair pretty well even if their bowls lose money while schools funnel their money to Athletic Directors and coaches rather than back into the school system or the students that earn them the money.
Bowl season is always entertaining and it is fun to see smaller schools participate but if it doesn’t make sense then there may need to be a change, something that the NCAA is opposed to in almost any situation.
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