What is it about amateur athletics that necessitates the need for an endless stream of product placement?
As we prepare for the culmination of the college football season Monday night, despite the fact that the BCS is horrifically corrupt and in no way constitutes a Bowl game, a true Championship, or a Series, what has college athletics come to?
It has come to the GoDaddy.com Bowl. A bowl game named for a website company that has made a name for itself using scantily-clad women and over-the-top cheekiness to sell their product.
It has come to the Beef O'Brady's Bowl. A bowl game named for a chain of restaurants no one outside of the Gulf region has ever heard of.
It has come to the BBVA Compass Bowl. I don't know what BBVA stands for, but perhaps a compass will lead me to it?
It has come to the Meineke Car Care Bowl. This is in no relation whatsoever to the Meineke Car Care Bowl of Texas. Seriously. By the way, this reminds me. My car is due for an oil change...
It has come to the Belk Bowl. I have no idea, either.
Shouldn't the Kraft Fight Hunger Bowl and the Chick-fil-A Bowl partner up? Seems to me there is a synergy there. Branch it out to the Little Caesar's Pizza Bowl and you would really have something. Don't even get me started on how the Famous Idaho Potato Bowl can get involved.
Am I the only one that feels smarter after watching the Insight Bowl?
The Orange Bowl used to be played at the Orange Bowl. The Cotton Bowl used to be played at the Cotton Bowl. Today, the Miami Marlins call what was the Orange Bowl home, meanwhile, something called the "TicketCity Bowl" calls the Cotton Bowl home. Meanwhile, the Cotton Bowl isn't played at the Cotton Bowl anymore; it's at the Metroplex's edifice to excess known as Cowboys Stadium.
The Humanitarian Bowl was played in Boise every December from 1997-2009. There is nothing humanitarian about Idaho in December.
Over the years we have seen other such entrants into the college bowl game landscape as the Cigar Bowl, the Boot Hill Bowl, the papajohns.com Bowl, the Carquest Bowl, the MicronPC Bowl, the galleryfurniture.com Bowl, the MagicJack Bowl, and my personal favorite, the Poulan Weedeater Bowl.
This isn't to hate on the vast litany of bowl games that permeate the second half of December. Sure, no one really cares about (or attends) the Bell Helicopter Armed Forces Bowl (neither of which participant was one of the service academies), but who cares? If the schools accept the invitation and the kids want to play, who am I to say that any particular bowl game is unworthy?
Some bowl games were wisely disbanded. Wisconsin played in the final Garden State Bowl in 1981. It was disbanded in part because no one really wanted to go to New Jersey's Meadowlands in December. Then again, the Super Bowl will be played there next year, so what do I know? As a warm up (thaw-out?) the Pinstripe Bowl played at Yankee Stadium is just getting off the ground. The frozen ground.
Here is what I don't get about college football. How can the NCAA decry amateurism at every turn for the student-athletes themselves when simultaneously selling themselves out to the highest bidder every chance they get? The very same governing body allows football players at a BCS game to go into the "gift suite" and pick out $500 worth of merchandise; be it a gift card, laptop, iPad, television, watch, or whatever else is in there but also says that a booster cannot buy a recruit lunch seems a bit hypocritical.
Yet, this is the engine that drives college athletics.
What most on the "of course you should pay the kids" side of the argument don't understand is that most college athletics programs overall operate on a loss. For all of the millions that are generated by football and men's basketball, there is a women's softball team that has a road trip.
The dollars that you spend attending those games are then re-funneled into other sports. And because the Big Ten shares its revenue equally among its member schools, if you bought a ticket to the Rose Bowl, it is quite possible that you just funded the entire hotel and per diem for a Northwestern lacrosse player in Ann Arbor. Or a Michigan State tennis player in Minneapolis. Or a Nebraska golfer in State College. That's just the way it is. The revenue sports pay for the non-revenue sports.
The debate over whether or not to pay college athletes is almost as age-old as the games themselves. For generations, student-athletes were given such "jobs" as making sure the stadium didn't get stolen while administrators looked the other way. The same infractions that brought down the USC and Ohio State football programs (and soon enough Miami and North Carolina will join their ranks) at one point were commonplace. Today, with the spotlight of the media peering into every school's dirty laundry, it almost seems like it is only a matter of time before a scandal erupts at your school.
The question then becomes what should the NCAA enforce and what should they let slide?
If a student-athlete is allowed to pick out a new HD television from the (FedEx) Orange Bowl's gift suite, why should he then be punished for accepting a stereo from an advertiser on his home school's stadium scoreboard?
Can you tell me what the difference is?
In principle there is no difference. But in the NCAA's convoluted reality, the difference is night and day; the difference between Jim Dandy okay and suspendable infraction. The message becomes "you can get lots of free stuff, but only from the sponsors that spend money with us can you get it."
The hypocrisy that governs college athletics knows no bounds. What is supposed to be an amateur athlete's advocacy organization has become over the years a mishmash of confusing rules that make sense to no one.
And while the solution isn't to just let everything under the sun be permitted, the committee on infractions needs to take a good hard look at the inconsistencies that govern their very organization.
To sell bowl games names the point of utter absurdity gives the NCAA very little moral ground to stand on. When the GoDaddy.com Bowl is allowed to slap its brand all over the NCAA's property, you know they have no intention of saving their dignity. When the Poulan Weedeater Bowl becomes a destination for the celebration of the student-athlete, the cries of "improper benefits" gets lost over the crabgrass that is whacked with dollar bills.
Money will never go away in college sports. This is both abundantly clear and not even necessarily a bad thing. But the next time the NCAA imposes its will on a school that otherwise has had a pretty good run of at least trying to play within the rules, perhaps the governing body will remember what their job actually is.
Their job is not to punish, but rather to make the student-athlete experience the best it can be. It is about time they realize that.
Doug Russell has been covering Milwaukee and Wisconsin sports for over 20 years on radio, television, magazines, and now at OnMilwaukee.com.
Over the course of his career, the Edward R. Murrow Award winner and Emmy nominee has covered the Packers in Super Bowls XXXI, XXXII and XLV, traveled to Pasadena with the Badgers for Rose Bowls, been to the Final Four with Marquette, and saw first-hand the entire Brewers playoff runs in 2008 and 2011. Doug has also covered The Masters, several PGA Championships, MLB All-Star Games, and Kentucky Derbys; the Davis Cup, the U.S. Open, and the Sugar Bowl, along with NCAA football and basketball conference championships, and for that matter just about anything else that involves a field (or court, or rink) of play.
Doug was a sports reporter and host at WTMJ-AM radio from 1996-2000, before taking his radio skills to national syndication at Sporting News Radio from 2000-2007. From 2007-2011, he hosted his own morning radio sports show back here in Milwaukee, before returning to the national scene at Yahoo! Sports Radio last July. Doug's written work has also been featured in The Sporting News, Milwaukee Magazine, Inside Wisconsin Sports, and Brewers GameDay.
Doug and his wife, Erika, split their time between their residences in Pewaukee and Houston, TX.
