College Football Bowl Games, Lobbying and Corporate branding

Ah, I remember the days when college football bowls games were just simply called the Rose Bowl or the Sugar Bowl. Those days are long gone.

Money has always influenced college sports in one way or another, with boosters giving money and gifts to athletes for recruiting purposes or scholarship money to someone who could run fast with a ball. However, in recent years college football has evolved to a whole new commercial level with corporate sponsorship of bowl games.

There are dozens of college football bowl games, all of which involve universities getting paid to play in them. In addition, the bowl games themselves have become an opportunity for corporations to get lots of advertising and branding of their names.

For instance, there are six games being played today, all of which are traditional bowl games like the Rose Bowl. However, now most of these games are named after the corporate sponsor. In today’s matchup between MSU and Georgia, the game is called the Outback Bowl, named after the restaurant chain. There is also the TicketCity Bowl, Taxslayer Bowl, the Capital One Bowl, the Tostitos Fiesta Bowl and the Rose Bowl sponsored by Vizio.

After today the remaining games include such sports-friendly names as Discover Orange Bowl, the AT&T Cotton Bowl and my favorite, the Godaddy.com Bowl. The University of Michigan is also in a bowl game this year and will play Virginia Tech in the Allstate Sugar Bowl.

Allstate seems to have been the real winner for this year’s college football season, since they are also the corporate sponsor to the championship game between LSU and Alabama, also known as the Allstate BSC Championship Game.

According to an investigation by the Center for Responsive Politics, corporations sponsoring these games are not unaccustomed to spending money to get what they want.

“AllState Insurance, which has its name on two marquees — the AllState National Championship and the AllState Sugar Bowl — has disbursed $2.62 million lobbying the federal government this year. Pepsi Co., which is sponsoring the Tostitos Fiesta Bowl, has spent $2.61 million, and credit card company Discover, of the Discover Orange Bowl, has laid out about $960,000 on federal lobbying.”

The Center for Responsive Politics also looked at how much universities lobbied the federal government in 2011 and discovered that the schools in the major college football games also collectively spent millions to influence Washington.

According to the Center’s report U of M outspent the rest of the schools. “But it’s the University of Michigan Wolverines that has spent the most lobbying the federal government this year, laying out $400,000. The mighty Maize and Blue marches all over its Sugar Bowl rival Virginia Tech, which anted up just $80,000.”

If one looks at regional and national news media, the college football bowl season will receive constant coverage. At the top of MLive today is an update about the MSU/Georgia game, but how often does the public get information about the lobbying being done by universities and corporations that sponsor these games?