The forthcoming book Death to the BCS is testament to the deep morass in which college football is now stuck. Consider that it took three authors and a two-year investigation just to explain the numerous and considerable flaws with the BCS. (Has there ever been a two-year investigation into any postseason system in any other sport?)

The system is almost universally hated. Even the President of the United States has felt compelled to express his contempt for the way college football chooses its champion. And let’s be clear – it chooses a champion.

Using a combination of flawed polls and even more absurd computer models – all of which the book’s authors Dan Wetzel, Josh Peter and Jeff Passan lay waste to – the BCS singles out two teams to compete in one game that takes place a month after the regular season ends. It is during this month that the authors propose – in chorus with many others – a 16-team postseason playoff that would build off the momentum of the regular season.

Of course, the problem with proposing a playoff alternative to the BCS is that the debate often shifts away from the serious problems with the BCS itself and onto whether the playoff plan is feasible.

In truth, anything is better than the BCS.

But the plan put forward by Wetzel, Peter and Passan is certainly the strongest BCS-alternative to date. In sum, they propose a 16-team playoff that would give all 11 conferences an automatic qualifier and add five at-large teams. Higher-seeded teams would get to host playoff games, giving them a reason to compete all season and the race for the five at-large berths would create even more drama. The final game would take place in the Rose Bowl every year, thus embracing the tradition of “The Granddaddy of Them All” and creating an equivalent to college baseball’s annual trip to Omaha.

The authors are adamant that not only could bowl games continue to co-exist with a playoff, they argue that a playoff is actually necessary in order to save the bowl games. Because right now the bowl games are bankrupting college football. Wetzel and crew write: “Bowl directors estimate that only fourteen of the thirty-five games generate a legitimate profit for the participating teams.” And that profit is often peanuts compared to the profits the bowl organizations take home. Even college football’s most elite programs don’t make that much off the bowls. According to a South Florida Sun-Sentinel report, for winning the 2009 national title, Florida made just $47,000 after coaches’ bonuses, required ticket purchases, travel costs and other expenses were figured in.

But the more serious problem is that the bowl game system takes in public money while privatizing the profits. Here’s Wetzel, Peter and Passan:

The twenty-three [bowl] games with records publicly available received $7.5 million in direct government handouts, according to their federal tax filings. That’s straight cash. It doesn’t factor in the estimated millions from police and fire department detail work, traffic control, clean up, and other public services donated to the games by local governments that assume the overtime costs.

Meanwhile, and perhaps the author’s most damning example, the Sugar Bowl in fiscal year 2007 brought in $34.1 million in revenue while spending only $22.5 million. So it made $11.6 million tax-free and finished the year with $37 million in assets. This would be problematic enough, but consider that, according to the authors, the “non-profit” Sugar Bowl took $3 million in direct funding from the Louisiana state government and “gave nothing” back that year. “Not a buck to the Hurricane Katrina reconstruction effort. Not a dime to a New Orleans afterschool program. Not a penny to Habitat for Humanity.”

The authors certainly demonstrate that a playoff will be more profitable. Drawing upon a team of experts, the authors conclude that a postseason playoff alone would gross $750 million a year compared to the current bowl system’s $220 million per year. And the authors make the case that the bowls could still make about half of that much even with a playoff. So that’s $860 million in total.

Their strongest argument – and one which deserves greater depth, both in the book and elsewhere – is that the amount of money that could be generated from a college playoff would help schools around the country who are in dire financial straits.

While sports fans are often hesitant to call for the government’s involvement in sports, there are legitimate public policy concerns here. Just last week, Playoff PAC, a nonprofit in Washington, D.C., lobbying for a college playoff, filed a 27-page complaint with the IRS that flushes out many of the most damning elements of Death to the BCS. Playoff PAC writes that “the BCS Bowls’ use of charitable funds to give Bowl executives excessive compensation, pay registered lobbyists without disclosure, intervene in political campaigns, and heap frivolous benefits on Bowl insiders raises significant concerns under federal tax laws.”

It is imperative that other sports journalists, college administrators and football fans read Death to the BCS. The authors have passionately – and successfully – debunked all the claims made by BCS apologists and offered a perfectly rational solution. It’s now up to sports fans around the country to spread the word and finally organize into one collective voice in favor of a college football playoff.

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Brian Frederick is the Executive Director ofSports Fans Coalition. He holds a Ph.D. in Communication and lives in Washington, D.C. Email him at sportsfanscoalition@gmail.com

Here’s a really interesting article from Sports Illustrated‘s vault on the (then) new blackout law. The opening story is hilarious, as is this gem at the end about a letter a Philadelphia Eagles fan wrote to owner Leonard Tose:

“Don’t be so irked about the anti-blackout law,” the fan advised. “I took advantage of the free game on TV, but I promise I will never watch the Eagles again.”

(h/t TheBigLead)

Suds, Sports and Stadium Swindles

by Brian Frederick

Beer and sports are inextricably intertwined. Many of us can’t even imagine watching a game without a beer. This weekend Sports Fans Coalition will join craft brewers and tens of thousands of beer fans in celebrating the sacred marriage of grains, hops, water and yeast at the Great American Beer Festival. Roger I. Abrams, an authority on sports law, calls beer “the mother’s milk of sports, the engine that drives the enterprise.”

The most concrete (literally) examples of the symbiotic relationship between beer and sports are Miller Field, Coors Field, and Busch Stadium.*

Of course, these stadiums are named after the massive breweries that have ruled the American beerscape for decades. But the very act of naming these stadiums after the breweries is itself a demonstration of their strength and ability to squeeze out competitors. And in the case of Miller Park and Coors Field, taxpayers that financed the stadiums should have received greater benefit from these names.

As for the New Busch Stadium, it’s the third stadium in St. Louis to bear the brewer’s family name. Here’s how author Ethan Trex describes that history:

In 1953, the brewery wanted to buy the naming rights for Sportsman’s Park, the home of the St. Louis Cardinals, and rename the park “Budweiser Stadium.” National League President Ford C. Frick wasn’t so hot on naming a stadium after booze, but he allowed Augustus Busch to stick his family’s surname on the park. The Cardinals opened the 1954 season in Busch Stadium. Anheuser-Busch quickly rolled out “Busch Bavarian Beer” to take advantage of this advertising. This Busch Stadium closed in 1966, but the Cardinals’ two subsequent homes have kept the name.

Busch and Busch Light beers continue to exist most likely only because of the stadium name (and their popularity with broke college students).

When Miller Park was in development, the Brewers ended up selling the naming rights to Miller Beer for $40 million. Nevermind that the taxpayers in Milwaukee and surrounding counties ponied up all the money for a stadium that owner and MLB Commissioner Bud Selig had originally proposed as a privately financed park. (Field of Schemes author Neil deMause called it “the ultimate stadium wheel-and-deal.”)

But the history of Coors Field is even bitterer.

Denver taxpayers were reportedly swindled on the stadium revenues and its naming rights from the beginning. From the Denver Post:

Originally, taxpayers had been told the sale of naming rights would reap $8 million to $10 million for the district. The money was to be applied to the stadium’s bonding debt, thereby reducing the burden on taxpayers, but the Rockies collected on the naming rights instead.

The Rockies also reportedly received all revenues from the park under the original lease. However, controversy involving one of the original owners gave the city time to reexamine the lease resulting in a just slightly less egregious plan.

When Coors Brewing invested in the Rockies franchise around this time, its deal included naming rights for a period that some consider to be indefinite. According to the Denver Post, for a “$30 million investment, Coors Brewing got an equity stake as a limited partner in the ballclub, the stadium naming rights and other advertising and marketing opportunities to promote the company’s products in and around the ballpark.”

CEO Pete Coors sure swung a sweetheart deal, even if he didn’t have to work hard for it. From the Post:

From the earliest mention of a possible major-league franchise in Denver, Coors Brewing was interested in stadium-naming rights and other advertising benefits, but the company never was interested in an ownership stake, according to Peter Coors.

Naming the stadium after Coors Brewing was less an effort to immortalize the Coors name “as much as it was an effort to promote the company and its brand name,” he added.

Even before the stadium was finished, Coors Brewing was selling Coors Field merchandise even though their ownership of that name was disputed.

So Coors Brewing – as long as it remains an owner – has effectively locked up key advertising space in and the naming rights for a stadium and that the people of Denver by and large paid for. Other companies – including competing microbreweries – will never be able to compete with Coors as long as the stadium exists. Taxpayers should demand that Coors either renegotiate the naming rights fairly with a portion of the revenues going to the city or sell its share in the team if it wants to keep its naming rights.

Sports Fans Coalition raises a cold one to all the hardworking, taxpaying, sports-loving beer drinkers out there.

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*Another beer-related naming rights story occurred when Dolphin Stadium was renamed Land Shark Stadium for eight months in 2009 as sort of a quick-hit marketing gimmick, albeit a big one, to promote Land Shark Lager, brewed by Jimmy Buffet’s Margaritaville enterprise.

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Brian Frederick is the Executive Director of Sports Fans Coalition. He holds a Ph.D. in Communication and lives in Washington, D.C. Email him at sportsfanscoalition@gmail.com

NEWS MEDIA CONTACT:                     FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:
Jeremiah Tittle
(202) 674-0775                                     Friday, September 17th, 2010
Jeremiah@LinkStarPR.com

AFT Colorado Joins SFC In Questioning Stadium Financing, Inequitable BCS System

AFT (American Federation of Teachers) Colorado will be joining Sports Fans Coalition on Saturday to sign up University of Colorado Buffaloes fans for SFC. The groups are calling attention to the issues of public financing of sports stadiums and the inequitable BCS football system.

Completed in 2001, Invesco Field at Mile High wound up costing taxpayers nearly $400 million. Nevermind that Mile High Stadium was popular with fans (it was consistently sold out) and it was in fine shape. In fact, in order to build the new stadium, the city of Denver actually had to release the Broncos from their lease with Mile High Stadium which was not set to expire until 2018. So not only did the owner of the Broncos swindle Colorado taxpayers into building him a new stadium, he actually convinced them to break one of the strongest lease agreements in professional sports.

Here’s how Field of Schemes author Neil deMause describes what happened:

Next door to the Nuggets, Denver Broncos owner Pat Bowlen chimed in that his football’s home, Mile High Stadium, was rusting and might fall down. “This is a serious, serious question,” said Bowlen in asking for $180 million in state money toward a new stadium. “Where do we play in 1998 or 1999 if that stadium is condemned?” As in Detroit, independent engineers countered that Mile High was in fine shape; one declared that the stadium could “last indefinitely” if properly maintained. What was not in perfect shape, it turned out, was Bowlen’s bank account – the owner had sold the rights to Mile High’s luxury boxes some years earlier to raise some quick cash, and hoped that a new stadium would restored the millions a year in luxury-box revenue that he had sold off.

As for Coors Field, Denver taxpayers were reportedly swindled on the stadium revenues and its naming rights from the beginning. From the Denver Post:

Originally, taxpayers had been told the sale of naming rights would reap $8 million to $10 million for the district. The money was to be applied to the stadium’s bonding debt, thereby reducing the burden on taxpayers, but the Rockies collected on the naming rights instead.
The Rockies also reportedly received all revenues from the park under the original lease.  However, controversy involving one of the original owners gave the city time to reexamine the lease resulting in a just slightly less egregious plan.

When Coors Brewing invested in the Rockies franchise around this time, its deal included naming rights for a period that some consider to be indefinite. According to the Denver Post, for a “$30 million investment, Coors Brewing got an equity stake as a limited partner in the ballclub, the stadium naming rights and other advertising and marketing opportunities to promote the company’s products in and around the ballpark.”

CEO Pete Coors sure swung a sweetheart deal, even if he didn’t have to work hard for it. From the Post:

From the earliest mention of a possible major-league franchise in Denver, Coors Brewing was interested in stadium-naming rights and other advertising benefits, but the company never was interested in an ownership stake, according to Peter Coors.

Naming the stadium after Coors Brewing was less an effort to immortalize the Coors name “as much as it was an effort to promote the company and its brand name,” he added.
Even before the stadium was finished, Coors Brewing was selling Coors Field merchandise even though their ownership of that name was disputed.

Coors Brewing – as long as it remains an owner – has effectively locked up key advertising space in and the naming rights for a stadium and that the people of Denver by and large paid for. Other companies – including competing microbreweries – will never be able to compete with Coors as long as the stadium exists.

SFC is also calling for a college football playoff in order to eliminate the current Bowl Championship Series system, which is inequitable and undermines the basic educational missions of far too many colleges and universities.

The University of Colorado’s decision to leave the Big 12 Conference this summer was primarily motivated by a desire to see greater football revenues as part of an expanded Pac-10 conference. However, the Buffaloes may end up having to pay somewhere in the neighborhood of $9 million in order to leave the Big 12 early. Given Colorado’s athletic department is already deeply in debt, with most of an $8 million loan from the CU system still to be paid off, the school’s penalty cannot be afforded.

The current BCS system is fueling conference realignment so fewer conferences are becoming larger and more powerful. Schools like CU are forced to spend more and more with the hope that revenues will increase in the future. SFC feels that a more equitable college football playoff system would have prevented CU from feeling it needed to move to the Pac-10 in order to have a better shot at succeeding in the current BCS system.

The BCS system distributes money unevenly. In 2010, the Big 12, Pac-10, ACC and Big East conferences all received $17.7 million each, while the SEC and Big 10 received $22.2 million each. Meanwhile, the five remaining conferences (including the Mountain West Conference, based in Colorado Springs) were left to split up $24 million among all of them. This uneven distribution of money undermines the basic educational missions of colleges and universities around the country because it reinforces the power of a handful of conferences and schools while forcing the rest to spend more money than they can generate in revenue in order to keep up.

Get more details about SFC’s agenda as a public advocacy group representing sports fans at www.SportsFansCoalition.org/agenda.

Fan-Ownership: A Novel Concept

by Jeremiah Tittle

If the idea of ownership is relative, today’s sports franchise owners feel they owe fans absolutely nothing, and fans are anything but family. These days, the owner-fan relationship is more like Ike to Tina than it is father to son or even that of distant cousins.

As sportswriter and SFC board member Dave Zirin has repeated on the Bad Sports book tour, “we’ve seen an economic model in which there is the socialization of debt and the privatization of profit.’ That means owners are more than happy to exploit taxpayers financially building subsidized stadiums and charging exhorbitant fees for parking and concessions, but they don’t want any input on how to run the team and bank every dime.

It’s a scam and it needs to stop.

Fan ownership is alive and well in Green Bay here in the states. Overseas, soccer clubs Barcelona in Spain, Benfica in Portugal, and if one politician is successful, Liverpool will wrest power from their despised owners in the UK. Walton MP Steve Rotheram tells the Liverpool Echo, “Those who are most under-represented – the fans – should have the most say.”

Couldn’t have said better myself.

This is the basis for SFC’s existence. Sports Fans Coalition formed to give fans a voice, a seat at the table when important decisions are made. Without SFC, what method do fans have to organize, mobilize, and affect change in this extremely dysfunctional system in which owners take, take, take leaving fans no money and no recourse.

The question of fan ownership is a complicated one, and it would take an extremely organized and passionate fanbase combined with political support to make this dream a reality. Duplicating the success of a team like the Green Bay Packers where profits are reinvested into community schools and charities rather than stuffing a greedy owner’s coffers is idealistic, but we’d like to believe it is an attainable long-term goal.

In the meantime SFC, with your support, seeks accountability from the leagues, owners, and politicians. If even one dime of public money goes to build or refurbish a stadium, the fans deserve affordable seating and media access to the games. Blackouts and PSL’s be damned.

Jeremiah Tittle is the Managing Editor of SportsFansCoalition.org. Reach him at Jeremiah@SportsFansCoalition.org. Apply for a position with the SFC Sportswriter Fellowship here.