The 2011-12 college football bowl games have started and there are 35 of them. The BCS games have a huge payout to the teams while most of the bowls put together a rather modest payout. The teams that play in the games don’t necessarily get rich in the process, in fact some schools and conferences actually lose money.
The distribution of payouts for each bowl game are divided the the chart below into quintiles, so for 35 bowls each quintile has seven, arrayed from smallest to largest. For comparison purposes the chart also plots US household income.
The distribution of household income in the United States in 2010 and the 2011-12 college football bowl game payouts are very similar for the lowest quintile: the 20 percent of the households and 20 percent of the bowl games account for just over three percent of the total. At the other end the top 20 percent of households account for 50 percent of the income. Meanwhile the top 20 percent of the bowl games account for about 68 percent of the payouts.
While the bowl game payouts may be skewed to the highest quintile it is worth noting that there is a significant amount of revenue sharing by all teams in the conference, after the bowl team travel expenses have been paid. So by no means is the payout a measure of income to the teams that play in the bowl games.
