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.