College football 'guarantee games', like the one due to take place on Saturday, seem baffling – until you follow the money
It's homecoming at Towson University and the Tigers, ranked 12th in the country in the NCAA's Football Championship Subdivision, or FCS, are putting a pounding on St Francis (Pa).
St Francis has 28 players on scholarship, compared to its opponent's 63; Towson, a power in college football's second division, makes short work of its guests. By halftime Towson leads 43-14 and the final score is 46-17. Most of the 9,838 fans leave happy. This week, however, the shoe will be on the other foot.
Louisiana State University, a Football Bowl Subdivision (FBS) team, third-ranked in the country and with 85 scholarship athletes and a stadium that seats more than 92,000 people, will play host to Towson, a commuter school from a suburb of Baltimore. LSU, also nicknamed the Tigers, will be an even firmer favorite than Towson was against St Francis.
So why is LSU playing Towson? The answer, as is the case in much of college football, is money.
Saturday's game in Baton Rouge will be what has come to be known in college football circles as a guarantee game, in which a major-conference team pays a lower-division team basically serving as Christians to be thrown to the bigger school's lions. Or in this case Tigers.
According to Mike Waddell, athletic director at Towson, his department will receive $510,000 from LSU for the game. For Waddell's school this is a terribly significant amount of money. For LSU, it is just a drop in the bucket.
Mismatches and lopsided scores have always been part of college football. On 7 October 1916, Georgia Tech squeaked by Cumberland 222-0. The coach of that Tech squad was John Heisman, the man for whom the Heisman Trophy is named.
A noticeable spike in pay-for-play games began in 2006, when the NCAA allowed teams to play a 12th regular-season game. The logic behind expanding the season was that teams could be more ambitious in scheduling non-conference games that would be appealing to fans, with major programs squaring off against each other.
The opposite has happened. In order to be eligible for a bowl game, an FBS team must win at least six games. But one of those wins can be against an FCS team, as long as that FCS team meets certain scholarship requirements.
Towson does, and so for each of the last four seasons its Tigers have played against an FBS team. Towson has lost those games by an average score of 42-12. Nonetheless, the Tigers added a second FBS opponent this year – producing a 41-21 loss to Kent State for which the school was paid $325,000. Next season, Towson will play at Connecticut; they will take on West Virginia in 2014.
Helping Towson's athletic department meet its financial obligations was probably not what the NCAA had in mind when it allowed the season to be expanded.
"When the NCAA first adopted the 12th-game exemption, the conventional wisdom was that it would allow schools greater flexibility to schedule more interesting non-conference match-ups against other top schools," said Paul Steinbach, a senior editor at Athletic Business magazine who has written extensively on guarantee games. "Instead, most of these top teams have used the extra game to just give themselves another payday."
A recent study by USA Today examined the athletic budgets of all the public universities that are required to release information regarding overall revenues and expenses, plus the amount of money the athletic departments receive as a result of fees paid by all students to help fund sports and state aid provided for athletics over the last five years. Private institutions, such as Notre Dame and Stanford, have no such requirements.
The study found that only seven of the 225 public schools for which data was available were able to turn a profit and give money back to the academic mission of the university, without taking state funds or student fees. LSU was one of them – the others were the University of Texas, the University of Oklahoma, Penn State University, the University of Nebraska, Purdue University and the Ohio State University.
From the outside, it always has seemed that a team that participates in a guarantee game is trying to win. But what LSU is really buying is the gate.
"We don't have student fees for athletics and we don't take state aid in the athletic program, yet we have one of the most successful athletic departments in the country," says Verge Ausberry, senior associate athletic director at LSU. "We are lucky in that we have three sports [football, men's basketball and baseball] that make money, whereas most schools only have two. But it all comes down to football, and we need to play at least seven home games a year to come out ahead."
According to figures that the school reported to the Department of Education, LSU football made $68.5m and reported a profit of $47m following the 2010 season. This was the fourth–best figure in the country; Texas was No1.
Games like the one against Towson are part of the reason why LSU is able to be so profitable. When scheduling a game against a school of similar stature a team like LSU would have to negotiate either a much larger payout to the opposing school or agree to return the game in an upcoming season. For example, LSU played Washington of the Pac-12 earlier this year in Baton Rouge, as the second leg of a series that saw the Tigers play the Huskies in Seattle in 2009.
"Tickets for a game like this [Towson] are a little bit cheaper [tickets for the Washington game were $50, while for the game against Towson they are $40], but we always sell out," Ausberry said. "But the concessions and the parking, that's where the department makes its money. And this is a game that you don't have to return. This is just a one-shot deal."
Towson is a public commuter school outside Baltimore, with an enrollment of over 17,000 undergraduates. The school's football stadium, Johnny Unitas Field – the Baltimore Colts legend did not attend the school but he had hoped to find it a corporate sponsor in the days before he died – has a capacity of just over 11,000, which makes it a little less than one-eighth of the size of LSU's Tiger Stadium, which seats 92,562.
Prior to last Saturday's game against St Francis, Waddell said he was hoping to make $100,000 if the stadium was close to capacity, which most weeks it isn't. So the LSU payout represents more money than Towson would expect to make from its entire home slate. Add in the Kent State payout, and this has been a banner year – financially – for Towson football.
"The costs of scholarships go up, and student fees are flat," Waddell said. "We have to play at least one of these games every year, and our coach has said that he's willing to play anybody, any time, anywhere. So it's off to LSU."
But it's not all about dollar signs. The team will get to play on national TV, on ESPNU, which is great exposure for a school that most people still call Towson State. (LSU running back Spencer Ware admitted in this week that he didn't even know where the school is located.) Plus, it will be an opportunity for the Towson players to play in an atmosphere unlike anything they have experienced before.
"Everybody gets something out of these games," Waddell said. "I'm not going to speak to what LSU gets, but we get a great recruiting tool and great exposure. I was at a meeting with Fortune 100 leaders for the Baltimore area, and they were talking about Towson football playing LSU. Plus, do you really think that we are going to be intimidated to play against a James Madison or a Delaware after this?"
Waddell speaks the truth. Everybody gets something out of this game. LSU gets an extra home game (eight of its 12 games this season will be played in Baton Rouge) and all that revenues that come with that. Towson gets a giant check and a chance to increase the school's visibility. LSU's players get what amounts to a bye week between tough conference games against Auburn and Florida. Towson's players get a chance to play in front of a gigantic crowd and an opportunity to pull off perhaps the greatest upset in college football history.
Guarantee games have produced upsets before. In 2007, little Appalachian State upset fifth-ranked Michigan 34-32, in one of the most famous college football upsets of all time. (Everybody interviewed for this story brought up that game at least once.) And Towson's coach, Rob Ambrose, talking to his hometown radio crew after last week's game, definitely thought a win was a possibility.
"Hey, they will put 11 on the field, we will put 11 on the field," he said. "If you don't think you are going to win, why bother playing?"
I think we just answered that question, Coach.
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