Football: UL expects to break even with New Orleans Bowl Money

Tim Buckley, The Advertiser, December 31, 2014

 

The 2014 R�L Carriers New Orleans Bowl trophy, helmet and UL helmet are on display during Media Day on Dec. 18 at the Mercedes-Benz Superdome in New Orleans. (Photo: Leslie Westbrook, Advertiser)

 

NEW ORLEANS – The first year the University of Louisiana at Lafayette football team went bowling in New Orleans — 2011 — it made a bundle of money.

The next year, not nearly as much.

The year after that, it was a comparative pittance.

This year?

One day before UL beat Nevada 16-13 in the Dec. 20 New Orleans Bowl at the Superdome, Cajuns athletic director Scott Farmer was not sure if the school would pocket any money at all beyond loose change. But Farmer also was quite certain UL wouldn’t lose anything beyond maybe a couple quarters in the couch cushion.

Final numbers won’t be known until all expenditures and income are accounted for several months from now, but he seemed sure.

“I think we can break even again,” Farmer said. “We kind of anticipated having a few less tickets sold, so we adjusted different things.”

How?

Just like anyone cuts costs, actually.

“It might just be as simple as, ‘OK … you don’t come down (to New Orleans) until Thursday,’ so you save two nights (of hotel costs) there,” Farmer said. “We did that with different staff members, and we cut down on the some of the things we purchased for the staff and the players.

“So we feel like we can, once again, at least break even and not have to dip into any foundation funds to cover expenses. We want to not have the bowl be a burden on our budget.”

The Ragin’ Cajun Athletic Foundation is a fundraising organization that supports Cajun athletics.

In 2011, when it beat San Diego State in its first New Orleans Bowl appearance and it sold about 18,800 tickets itself, UL walked away with approximately $374,000 in postseason profit.

That’s after all hard expenses — including transportation, accommodations and per diem; coaching and staff bonuses; supplies and equipment; labor, printing and rental — were covered.

In 2012, when UL beat East Carolina and the Cajuns sold more than 23,000 tickets themselves, the war-chest deposit, however, was down to about $40,000.

A change in Sun Belt Conference bowl-revenue distribution rules is the reason for that.

Money that would have gone to the Cajun program in 2012, 2013 and 2014 instead helps pay for bowl trips for other conference teams these days.

The altered split — effective 2012 — was proposed by Sun Belt commissioner Karl Benson and approved in a vote of athletic directors and presidents from Sun Belt schools.

In sum:

Previously, a Sun Belt school kept all of its bowl payout and kept all of its ticket revenue based on sales through the school beyond the bowl’s mandatory minimum.

In the case of UL in the New Orleans Bowl, executive director Billy Ferrante said, that minimum number falls between 8,000 and 9,000; anything above that was split 50-50 between the bowl and school.

The full bowl payout is $500,000 per team if the minimum-mandatory is met.

After the change, though, the $500,000 payout is split 50-50 between the school and the Sun Belt. Moreover, the amount of money gained by the school selling tickets above the minimum mandatory must be split between the school and the SBC too.

It’s all about subsidizing travel of conference programs.

When the Sun Belt had four teams go bowling in 2012, former member Western Kentucky — which had to travel to Detroit for the Little Caesar’s Bowl — was a big beneficiary of the subsidy funded largely by what under 2011 rules would have been profit for UL.

“Especially as we’ve gotten more bowl teams, travel has become more and more complicated,” Sun Belt associate commissioner John McElwain said this month in New Orleans. “The price of travel has increased.

“We don’t want our schools to have a negative bowl experience ever, and if that means subsidized travel then that’s what we’ll do.”

If any funds are left over after travel is covered, they are evenly distributed among all of the SBC bowl teams.

“At the very heart of it,” McElwain said of the conference, “we’re a service for our institutions, and we’ll take care of them as needed.”

Declining ticket sales play a part in keeping UL dollars down this year, too.

For its game against Nevada, the Cajuns sold more than 12,000 themselves — roughly half of what they sold in 2012, and down from about 21,000 for its 2013 win over Tulane.

Attendance for this year’s New Orleans Bowl, which was hurt at the turnstiles by an unusually early 10 a.m. start, was announced at 34,014 — 20,000-plus fewer than watched the Cajuns and Green Wave play last year.

Profit for individual schools is dependent largely on attendance, bowl executive Ferrante suggested.

“I can tell you it’s directly tied to the number of tickets they sell,” he said, adding, “You always want them to be successful coming to your game.”

For UL, that was the case early on.

But the Cajuns, Farmer suggested, realized relatively little profit after beating Tulane — less than $10,000.

Now that the profit is not nearly as much as when the Cajuns made their $374,000 in 2011, Farmer said he feels it’s time to “re-evaluate” the Sun Belt’s bowl-revenue sharing policy.

He believes that, even while understanding fully that sometime in the future the Cajuns could be the ones needing a subsidy to cover high travel costs.

“Now that the conference office is having multiple bowls… it might be time for all of us to sit down — the athletic director and the conference office — and kind of look at the whole bowl payout, for everybody,” said Farmer, whose Cajuns are the only team in NCAA history to win the same bowl four straight years.

The Sun Belt added a third tie-in bowl this year, with the Camellia Bowl in Montgomery, Alabama, joining two longtime affiliated bowls, the New Orleans Bowl and the GoDaddy Bowl.

Sun Belt-member South Alabama lost to Bowling Green in the Dec. 20 Camellia Bowl, and Arkansas State of the Sun Belt will play Toledo in next Sunday’s GoDaddy Bowl.