Didn’t you used to love college bowl games?
The tradition, the pageantry, the competition, the glory and the glamor they bring.
Do you still love that stuff?
Maybe not, not anymore. Not if you open your eyes.
And if you don’t and you do, you’re not alone. Some players have lost their love, too, bailing on their teams that are playing in assorted postseason games.
When Utah hits the field in the Zaxby’s Heart of Dallas Bowl the day after Christmas, it will face a West Virginia team that will play without star running back Justin Crawford, who has decided not to subject himself to the risks of another game as he prepares for professional football in the weeks ahead.
Other stars have done likewise in other bowl games, this year and in the recent past — LSU’s Leonard Fournette, Stanford’s Christian McCaffrey, Connor Williams and DeShon Elliott of Texas, and Florida State’s Derwin James.
It’s happening, and it likely will happen more often in the seasons ahead.
Does that bother you? A player leaving his team to look out for his own interests in pursuit of his career? What about his school? Its football program? His teammates and his coaches? Isn’t that kind of decision selfish and disloyal?
Let’s talk about selfishness and disloyalty for a minute.
Who has the most to gain from bowl games? It’s not the players.
It’s coaches who have large bonuses built into their contracts for bowl appearances and, in many cases, additional payouts for winning bowl games. According to a recent story in USA Today, Louisville coach Bobby Petrino and Georgia coach Kirby Smart receive bonuses that edge toward $500,000 and beyond for getting their teams into the postseason. If the Bulldogs win the Rose Bowl and move on to victory in the National Championship game, Smart will receive $1 million, and that comes on top of the $3.7 million he’s earning via his regular pay.
To varying degrees, other coaches get paid, too.
Utah’s Kyle Whittingham receives a bonus of $164,167 when the Utes make a lesser bowl game and he gets $300,000 for making a New Year’s 6 game.
So the next time you hear a coach talk about wanting his guys to qualify for a bowl game — which well over half the teams at the FBS level do — on account of rewarding a team’s seniors for all their good effort through the years, you can go ahead and laugh out loud about that.
The most the players can receive is $550 worth of duffel bags, coffee mugs and T-shirts.
You know, because no reputable person wants these young men distracted and tarnished by temporal things like … money. They need to be singularly focused on making it for their coaches and administrators.
Not only do those coaches get bags of cash for that so-called players’ reward, they also get an additional three weeks of practice to place their team in a better position to qualify for another bowl the following season, which will benefit you-know-who again next time around.
The aforementioned USA Today story, a most informative read, also revealed data on the pay of tax-exempt bowl executives, who received anywhere between $300,000 and $1.2 million for their services in so-called non-profit games.
“So much money has been flooding the college football system in recent years that even tax-exempt bowl game executives have seen their pay explode from 2005 to 2015, the most recent year of available data,” the story reported.
Citing examples such as Gary Stokan, president of the non-profit Peach Bowl, who made $684,000 in 2015, including first-class travel for him and companions and social-club dues, and Jim McVay, head of the Outback Bowl, who earned $993,458 in 2015, it is clear that the bowl business can be lucrative for those who run it. Over a 10-year span, each of those bowl bosses saw their pay more than double.
Meanwhile, the players, in the name and glorification of amateur sports, get assorted trinkets, memories — so there’s that, and those additional 15 practice sessions, filled with sweat and blood and bruises, for their trouble, all while coaches scream at them to sacrifice for the name on the front of their jerseys, not the name on the back.
It’s not necessarily, top to bottom, all the coaches’ and bowl executives’ fault.
They’re just part of an NCAA system that is a cartel.
People talk about preferring college athletics over the pros because they are a more pure brand of sports. What a joke that is. College sports is dirtier and certainly more hypocritical. At least the pros are what they are, they don’t hide behind a facade of educational opportunity.
The college games are about limiting the liability of institutions and conferences, about maintaining cheap labor and low costs while securing huge profits — all for amateurism’s glory and their own gain.
If you had a talented kid who was on the verge of getting drafted by an NFL team, how would you feel about the prospects of having him run out on that field for the last time for the name on the front of his jersey, taking with him the risks that come along with suiting up for the man, when it is the man who is getting the real rewards?
Him and a bunch of other men in suits and women in business wear sitting behind large desks in big offices.
It’s enough to suck the love you used to have right out of bowl games, when you fully understand what’s happening here. It’s just another example of misdirection, of propping up and celebrating tradition and pageantry and competition, and taking advantage of the public’s desire to believe in something that isn’t real, isn’t what it seems to be.
GORDON MONSON hosts “The Big Show” with Spence Checketts weekdays from 3-7 p.m. on 97.5 FM and 1280 AM The Zone.