Renz said:
First, we finished the season 7-5 (last I checked Bowl games counted.
)
Second, azstarnet.com - What do they know about football?
BTW: Way to take things out of context. Just above that it points out how much even the sorry Wildcats will get in postseason revenue because of bowl revenue sharing in the Pac-10.
From the article:
Even though the Wildcats are sitting out the bowl season for the seventh consecutive season, they expect to receive about $1.4 million from the league's bowl-sharing revenue pool.
Here's a recent article on ASU and the Insight Bowl:
Insight ‘trip’ will be moneymaker for ASU
By Dan Zeiger, Tribune
December 21, 2005
After Arizona State’s win against archrival Arizona, Dirk Koetter held up the Territorial Cup — which had a small Insight Bowl patch affixed to it — and said his team was going to its own little Disneyland.
"We’re spending Christmas in downtown Phoenix!" the Sun Devils coach yelled at his postgame press conference. "Have you ever been there during that time of year? It’s beautiful!"
Though dollars and cents were likely the last thing triggering his euphoria at the moment, Koetter could have added the ASU athletic department will save a bunch of money on the Sun Devils’ bowl "trip."
With ASU’s game against Rutgers on Tuesday night a few miles down the road at Chase Field, the school will spend substantially less on lodging and transportation. There will also be no unsold tickets to eat.
As a result, Amy Schramm, associate athletic director for business affairs, is projecting that ASU will keep about $137,000 of the $750,000 Insight payout after expenses. That is a fiscal achievement, considering many schools actually lose money on a bowl game.
"We try to make sure it’s a good experience for the players," Schramm said. "That’s the main thing we want to do. But if we are able to be fiscally conservative and still provide that good time, we try to do that.
"And we’ve been able to do it in the bowls we’ve been in recently because we operate on a tight budget overall annually."
For Koetter, the main benefits of the Insight Bowl trip are in the exposure for the program and the 15 extra days of practice. The bottom line? That’s for the worrywarts in the accounting department.
"I leave that up to (director of football operations) Tom Kleinlein and the administrators," Koetter said. "But obviously, I’m happy that we can have (a surplus). The funds can help any program in our department that has a need for them."
After losing money on the 1999 and 2000 Aloha Bowls — a deficit on a postseason trip to Hawaii is pretty much unavoidable — ASU managed to turn a surplus from the 2002 Holiday and 2004 Sun bowls. That money went into the athletic department’s general budget.
Schramm said the Insight Bowl revenue will provide a cushion to help balance the athletics budget, which is $37.4 million for fiscal year 2005.
"It will be nice to have that money available in case something comes up, like a shortfall in revenue or an unexpected expense," Schramm said.
Unless a school is fortunate to play in a big-money Bowl Championship Series game, postseason profits can be hard to come by. A 2000 study by USA Today revealed at least 18 schools came home from their bowl games with a deficit, some exceeding $300,000.
BYU’s trip to the 1999 Motor City Bowl in Detroit was painful on the field (a 21-3 loss against Marshall) and the wallet (a $250,000 shortfall).
"Everybody wants to talk about the big money the bowls pay out," then-Brigham Young athletic director Val Hale said in 2000. "But if you do not sell all of your tickets and have to travel a long way, that money is eaten up very quickly."
Typically, bowl travel expenses for a school easily exceed six figures. ASU has budgeted $81,300 in plane fares for this year’s Insight Bowl — most of that going toward player trips home for Christmas.
Meals and lodging — which cost $253,300 at the 2000 Aloha Bowl and $231,300 at last year’s Sun Bowl — are projected to cost $129,950 for the Insight Bowl, as ASU’s party will spend only two nights in a hotel.
With those savings, the Sun Devils can afford to splurge in other areas. Entertainment expenses are up this year, mainly because Koetter wants to provide the players with a variety of extra activities. For example, players took part in a paintball excursion earlier this week.
"Since they are staying home, you have to do some special things, or the guys will go stir crazy," Koetter said. "The nice thing about Phoenix is that there are a lot of restaurants and places we haven’t been to."
For schools in BCS conferences, individual bowl trip losses are more than offset by postseason disbursements from the league. Last year, the Pac-10 sent ASU and the other nine schools $1.5 million each.
Schools in non-BCS leagues do not enjoy such a windfall. Also, many of them are relegated to the 11 bowls that have the NCAA minimum payout of $750,000.
Southern California, meanwhile, will collect $15 million for the Pac-10 when it plays Texas for the national title in the Rose Bowl.
"We always want to be in a bowl," BYU’s Hale said in 2000. "But wearing my athletic director’s hat, balancing my budget, my job gets a little easier when we don’t. That’s the irony of the whole thing."
It would have been a challenge even for Schramm and her fellow number crunchers to squeeze a surplus from a minimum-payment bowl. Luckily for ASU, the $750,000 game that offered it an invitation was the one in town.
"In a budget of $37 million, $100,000 doesn’t sound like a very big deal," Schramm said. "But it’s good to have it there if we need it."
