Bowls' extravagant revenues are closely examined as the NCAA

[dcpony]

mulls playoff.


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.

To play the BCS halftime show, the LSU band had to fork over $182,830 for tickets. (AP)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.

[Related: Here's all you need to know about the playoff discussions at this week's BCS meeting]

All in all, the "2012 BCS Complimentary Tickets" document obtained by Yahoo! Sports detailed most of what would wind up being a $526,924 bill LSU owed the Sugar Bowl just for tickets.

It isn't uncommon. Almost every bowl charges schools for everything it can dream up. That's how the industry works: cutthroat capitalism that has made these games and the people that run them rich.

Yet, now athletic directors and conference commissioners say the extreme profiteering is one of the reasons bowl games could be pushed aside as college football's power brokers meet this week in Florida to discuss the future of the postseason.

"Everything has changed in the last couple of years," said an athletic director at a BCS school. "The business practices of the bowl games are of great discussion. … When is enough, enough?


http://sports.yahoo.com/news/ncaaf--bow ... ystem.html

[Mustangsabu]

Charging the kids and their parents and the ban that performs is ridiculous.


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