Easy Money!!

                How many while away their days with dreams of easy money?  Lottery winnings, unexpected inheritances, legal settlements.  It’s all gravy and we dream of our share. 

            One group to recently join this fraternity is the management of some smaller colleges with football programs.  They see what is called the BCS (Bowl Championship Series) which allocates the spots in the major football bowls with the largest prizes, some paying out an unbelievable $13 million per team.  The smaller schools contend that there is a conspiracy among the larger schools and their conferences to divvy up the loot among themselves and leave the little fellows out in the cold. 

            But let’s consider where this great bundle comes from.  Since these are the most popular teams, they usually sell all their tickets.  Then there is the real bonanza, TV money which is contingent on the number of people expected to watch a particular game.  When I took a course on advertising in college many years ago, they told us that advertisers pay for exposure to their ads.  The more people likely to see the ad, the higher the price.  Television extends this to the maximum since an incredible number of people can and do watch these games.

            The issue has even come to the attention of Congress.  They have held hearings in which the smaller schools presented their case for fairness in the way teams are assigned to the more lucrative bowls.  Their idea being that they should have a shot at getting in and getting their hands on the big prize.

            If Congress gets involved and we go to the extreme, eventually we might see a Rose Bowl featuring West Wetumka Tech versus Pelahatchie StateTeachers College.  Ticket sales would be off.  Many of the followers of these teams would be put off by the prospect of spending four days on a Greyhound bus getting out there to California from Alabama and Mississippi and would stay home.  Since nobody in California had ever heard of either team, local sales would slump, down to the dozens.  Ad revenue would be off too since it wouldn’t take too long for the advertisers to figure out that nobody would be interested in seeing this on TV. 

            But the cost of putting on the game and presenting the broadcast would still involve hundreds of people at a cost of millions.  So instead of a multimillion dollar prize, there would be millions in losses to distribute and nobody wants that.

            This means we always have to look at where things come from.  The money that is distributed by the BCS is money earned because they feature the best and most popular teams.  It isn’t conjured up through magic or from some government grant or bailout.  There is no mystery about this.  It comes from people who don’t have to pay unless they want to.  As with most any situation, before the loot can be divided up, it has to be earned.