What gives?

[cactuswatcher]

When the pairings for the Fiesta Bowl and the Insight Bowl came out yesterday, a lot of fans' jaws must have dropped. It looked like this year the non-BCS schools were going to have a chance to wreak havoc on the "big" schools by possibly winning not one, but two BCS games. You'd think TCU and Boise both would be near tears to discover they were placed together in the same game, a who-cares rematch of last year's Poinsettia Bowl. Similarly the Insight Bowl passed on Missouri with a better conference and over-all record to pick Iowa St.

Frankly neither TCU-Boise nor Iowa St.-Minnesota makes a lot of sense unless you see what the "other" games ended up with. Surely the Sugar and Orange Bowls are happier with the contests they got than if the Fiesta Bowl had taken Iowa or even Cincinnati to replace Big 12 Champion, Texas. The here-to-fore hapless, bottom of the barrel Texas Bowl gets an 8-win Missouri vs a Navy team that has 8 wins before meeting Army. Reading the papers from back home, something sounds very suspicious. The guaranteed pay out for the Texas Bowl is a half million dollars less than the Insight Bowl offers. Yet the protests from the Missouri team have been fairly mild and self-dismissive. It scarcely matters financially on the Phoenix end whether Iowa St. or Missouri comes. It would end up a fairly uninspiring match up with mostly pay-per-view coverage on NFLN. The way it is now ESPN gets a much more attractive pairing for the early game on New Year's Eve and NFLN network gets no worse a match for its game later the same day.

No doubt Missouri would have been gracious to the Texas Bowl in any case, but the officials there sound more eager than you'd think they would be. You have to wonder considering the mild reaction of the Missouri sports press in KC and St. Louis, whether the fix wasn't in early. You have to wonder if serious money hasn't exchanged hands with both the Insight Bowl and the Fiesta Bowl (which share a single organizing committee) getting paid off as well as the Missouri team.

Comments

[dlgood.livejournal.com]

Keep in mind that the payout to the schools gets shared among conference members, so that $500k difference is actually smaller.

As to the Fiesta, I'm actually buying their arguments. Fiesta had first pick and took TCU ... and then selected Boise State over Cincy/Georgia Tech. The Bowl committee claimed it did so because Boise is closer to Pheonix and Cincy is much closer to New Orleans. Yeah, it's sad that we won't see either of these teams play Florida - but they're two of the best teams left (BCS #4 vs. BCS #6) and makes it a good match-up if you weren't looking at conference affiliation. As long as there's no playoff, it's about as good as one can do.

[cactuswatcher.livejournal.com]

Half the pay out is shared in the Big 12, if I remember correctly, so the bowl team's share is half plus 1/24 (1/12 of the other half) instead of just 1/24th of it. Still Missouri will probably lose more money indirectly because of the lack of a qualified second BCS team in the conference this year than it will directly from missing in Insight Bowl.