Bowled over by this excellent job!

I pay about as much attention to the college football bowls as I do to college football in the regular season. Which is next to none.

Oh, on New Year’s Day, I was at my sister Trish’s when she realized that Northwestern, her alma mater, had mounted a comeback victory against Utah in the Holiday Bowl. The game had been played on December 31, but was televised on January 1. We put it on for about 2 minutes.

Because it was covered in the Boston Globe, I noticed that the First Responder Bowl, in which local fan non-favorite/meh team Boston College was playing Boise State, was canceled because of lightning. Guess they didn’t want any first responders to actually have to respond first.

And I know some folks whose son is an assistant coach at the University of Florida, so I was aware of Florida’s thumping Michigan in the Peach Bowl. (In other respects, however Michigan thumps Florida, starting with the fact that Our Tom Brady went to Michigan, while his former teammate, murderous thug Aaron Hernandez, was a Gator.)

And although I won’t watch the game, I realize that Alabama and Clemson are going at it this week in some sort of playoff for “we’re number one” bragging rights.

Mostly, I don’t pay a lot of attention to football, college or otherwise. (That said, I will probably watch the Super Bowl in the unlikely event that the Patriots and Our Tom Brady somehow make it there.)

But I am certainly aware that there are a ton of bowl games out there.

When I was growing up, New Year’s Day meant the Big Four bowl games: Sugar, Cotton, Orange and Rose. Then, over time, a few other bowls crept in, floating around on the periphery of bowldom – Peach, Fiesta, Liberty.

And now? Wow!

Whole lot of bowlin’ going on.

There’s something called the Celebration Bowl. And something else called the Cure Bowl. If there’s ever a cure for breast cancer, the cure promoted by the Curl Bowl, perhaps these bowls can merge and become the Celebrate the Cure Bowl.

New Mexico, Texas, Birmingham (AL),  New Orleans, Boca Raton, Frisco (TX) and Las Vegas each has its own eponymous bowl. And Nashville has the Music City Bowl, which is somewhat eponymous. Who knew any of this? (The New Mexico Bowl is played at Dreamstyle Stadium. And if you’re wondering what Dreamstyle is, it’s a home remodeling business located in Albuquerque NM.) There’s even a Bahamas Bowl. They used to say that everything was better in the Bahamas, but the teams that played in this bowl were Florida International and Toledo, so…

The Rose isn’t the only flowery bowl. There’s a Camellia Bowl. There’s also a tuber-based bowl: Famous Idaho Potato. And some just plain boring company-named bowls: Dollar General, Belk, RedBox. And the cheesy-sounding Cheez-It Bowl.

The only bowl that actually sounded fun is the Gasparilla Bowl, named for a pirate festival held in Tampa.

This is by no means the full roster of bowl games, but there are so many that a fair number of one-step-above-mediocre teams end up in one. And who would turn an invite down? The Cheez-It Bowl gives both teams $1M, and even though the lowly Dollar General Bowl pays out $750K.

Outback Steakhouse is another company that sponsors a bowl. As is befitting a full meal vs. a snack food, the Outback Bowl pays each team $3.5M for their appearance.

While this strikes me as a great deal of money, you have to keep in mind that college football, especially at its upper echelons, is a big business. And the major bowls – the old Big Four – pay each team playing $18M. (I think that’s right. I’ve seen a few different figures floating around out there. It didn’t seem worth putting much energy into figuring this particular thing out. Suffice it to say, going to an important bowl translates into important money.)

Anyway, the Outback Bowl is not in this elevated category. An article in the Washington Post on the fellow who runs it characterizes it as “a second-tier college football postseason game featuring third-place teams.”

The article wasn’t focused on the Outback Bowl qua bowl, but rather on Jim McVay, the exec who runs it. With a salary a bit over $1M, McKay was:

…the highest-paid bowl executive in the country in 2017, the most recent year financial records are available, even though his organization’s revenue that year — $11.9 million — ranked 10th among bowl organizations. While several bowl bosses manage other games or major events, McVay’s core duties remain as focused as they were when he took the job in 1988: negotiate contracts and sell sponsorships and tickets for one football game each year. (Source: WaPo)

I was going to say ‘nice work if you can get it’, but it’s hard for me to envision a more boring and altogether yucky job that spending your year talking to the folks who run big-time college football programs, and selling tickets to a game that no one really wants to see, other than hardcore fans of the teams playing. (This year, that would be Mississippi State and Iowa.)

To put McKay’s compensation in a slightly different perspective the chief exec for the Rose Bowl made the relatively paltry sum of $412M. (The Rose Bowl organization earned revenues close to $100M, so had a lot more $$$ coming in than did the Outback.)

It will come as no surprise that McVay declined the request for an interview for the WaPo article. However:

A former Outback board chairman, in a phone interview, defended McVay’s pay as “a bargain,” pointing to his ability to keep Outback, the SEC and the Big Ten locked into contracts, and the economic impact of tens of thousands of visitors each December.

“We don’t just throw money away . . . Jim’s very well-compensated, yes, but he’s worth every penny,” said Steve Schember, board member since 1990.

On the other hand:

When informed of McVay’s pay and the Outback Bowl’s revenue, one expert on the economy of college sports laughed.

“You really can’t justify this salary,” said Richard Southall, professor and director of the College Sport Research Institute at the University of South Carolina.

McVay is credited with saving this limping-along, debt-ridden, bowl when he took the job running it three decades ago. He forged agreements with the Big Ten and SEC conferences that guarantee that their third-place teams – not their fourth place teams – will play in the Outback. And got a good deal with ESPN for television rights.

Still, there’s only so many days in the year you can spend negotiating multi-year deals and schmoozing with the conference and TV guys. Sounds like a pretty cushy job to me. And the bottom line is that over the past 20 years, while the Outback’s revenue has “increased about 50 percent, McVay’s compensation jumped about 240 percent.”

And it sounds like McVay is a particularly good negotiator when it comes to his paycheck. He apparently does so by letting his board know that some NFL team or another is dangling an offer his way. And the board just doesn’t want to lose him.

McVay is also pretty good at compensating his staff. The Outback Bowl has only a handful of full-time employees. And:

In Tampa, a city where median income is $48,000, the lowest-paid Outback Bowl employee earned $138,000 last year.

I’m pretty bowled over by all this. All that money for running a average-y bowl. Nice work if you can get it, especially when you consider that the players themselves make zip…