Football Bowl Games: View From the Sidelines

Sure, you can go to ESPN or USA Today and drown in statistics about yards per carry and turnover ratios and profiles of the coaches and star players on the teams in this season's college football bowl games. But where do you go for the really important information about the bowl games -- you know, like how much money the teams and their conferences are sharing, and how the colleges' teams fare in the classroom?

Here, of course.

After a season filled arguably as never before with high-profile upsets, the annual talk of a full-blown playoff for the nation's highest-powered college football teams (like the one that exists in what used to be called Division I-AA, now called the Football Championship Subdivision), has intensified. But any change that might seriously undermine the existing football bowl structure is unlikely. That's partly because it leaves coaches and college presidents (and alumni, of course) affiliated with the 32 victorious universities smiling, and partly because of the financial payouts the bowls make to the participating colleges and their conferences, and the economic impact that the games themselves have on the host cities of the bowl games.

All told, the bowl games will provide roughly $245 million to the colleges whose teams will participate in the next month's games, much of which will be shared with their fellow conference members. (The exact amount is unclear, in part because the payouts are estimates and in part because one sponsor of several bowl games, ESPN Regional Television, declined to reveal the payments it planned to make to participating teams. A spokesman for ESPN could not be reached for comment on why the company -- whose television and magazine reporters are highly critical when teams or other parties withhold relevant salary or other financial information -- declined to provide the numbers.) Key information about the bowls, including their payout levels, which were drawn from the games' Web sites or other news sources, follows in the table below:

The 2008 Bowl Games, the Participants and the Payouts

Another alternative prism through which to view the upcoming bowl games is by looking at the academic performance of the football players at the colleges and universities involved. The University of Central Florida's Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport has done that work for us, collecting the relevant NCAA information -- on the Academic Progress Rate and the Graduate Success Rates -- for the 64 universities whose teams are participating in the bowl games between now and January 7.

Among the group's findings:

• 47 schools (73 percent) had graduation rates of 66 percent or higher for white football players, which was more than 3.6 times the number of schools with equivalent graduation rates for African-American football athletes (13 schools or 20 percent).
• 27 schools (42 percent) graduated less than 50 percent of their African-American football players, while only Florida Atlantic graduated less than 50 percent of their white football athletes.
• Seven schools (11 percent) graduated less than 40 percent of their African-American football student-athletes, while no school graduated less than 40 percent of their white football student-athletes.

Academic Performance of Bowl-Bound Football Teams, 2008

Source: Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport