Advertisers Are Being Bowled Over : Sports: Corporate sponsorships are hot, but a tidal wave of post-season football games leaves commercial time to spare and networks facing losses.

Today, college football fans die and go to heaven.

New Year’s Day offers a feast of bowl games on television. There are eight matchups between noon and midnight on the networks and cable.

But some fans may feel like they’ve descended to college bowl hell.

Viewers, long jaded by the endless stream of commercials in sports programs, now find that the sponsor has seemingly taken over the entire bowl game. In all, there are a record 19 college bowl games saturating the airwaves this season. Thirteen have sold “sponsor titles” to corporations, allowing the companies to affix their name and logo to the event.

The barrage of sponsor titles--announcers are contractually required to identify the Orange Bowl as the Federal Express Orange Bowl, for example--reflects a major shift in the business of collegiate athletics and who foots the bill for college sports programs.

Practically no bowl game today is without a sponsor title. There is the Mazda Gator Bowl in Jacksonville, Fla., the Mobil Cotton Bowl in Dallas, the Federal Express Orange Bowl in Miami and the USF&G; Sugar Bowl in New Orleans.

Corporate name-plating in college football even extends to the Poulan/Weed Eater Independence Bowl in Shreveport, La., after the lawn and garden company based there, and the Blockbuster Bowl in Miami, which takes its name from the home video store chain.

“Sports sponsorship is the fastest growing area of marketing,” said Keith Ritter, vice president of ABC Sports.

Unlike most other sports, there are no playoffs leading to a final championship in college football. There is, instead, the “bowl system,” where top-ranked teams compete after the regular season, and a “champion” is elected by sportswriters.

Yet it comes at a time when there is a glut of sports programming on television and when the advertising marketplace can no longer support the rapid expansion of regular season games, playoffs, championships and wild-card matches flooding network and cable channels.

“It’s good for football fans,” said Jon Mandel, executive vice president at Grey Advertising in New York, “but not necessarily good business.”

In fact, this year only a handful of the bowl games are projected to make money for the networks or syndicators that distribute the games to local stations. Part of that is due to the soft TV sports marketplace, which, after annual advertising growth rates of 10%, is expected to slow this year to 5%.

“Everybody is hurting right now with bowls,” said Jon Miller, vice president of NBC Sports.

The cost of a 30-second commercial in a college bowl game can range anywhere from the low tens of thousands of dollars for a game on ESPN all the way up to $200,000 in the Rose Bowl on ABC. But as of late last week, ABC was still calling advertising agencies and advising it had unsold commercial space available for the Rose Bowl.

“The primary thing that hurts the sports marketplace this year is the increased number of commercials available,” observed Grey’s Mandel. “Revenue is up, but the amount of inventory to buy is up at a greater pace. College bowls are also on at a time of the year when, historically, there is not a lot of demand for advertising.”

Now some are predicting a shakeout in the number of televised bowl games because of a lack of advertising to support all the matchups sought by civic groups as a way of boosting local economies.

“The bowls have taken the free market system to its natural end,” said Len DeLuca, vice president of programming at CBS Sports. “We are now beyond the high water mark in terms of bowls.”

But if bowl games aren’t exactly proving to be a good business for the networks, the same cannot be said for the cities that host them. Thousands of people arriving for a weekend is a boomlet for restaurants and hotels.

Indeed, bowl games can pump a lot of money into the local economy. The Pasadena Tournament of Roses Assn., which organizes the Tournament of Roses parade and accompanying Rose Bowl, estimates that those two events pour $68 million into the city. The Rose Bowl is one of the few bowl games left that has not wooed a title sponsor.

“We have enough from TV rights fees and the gate,” explained Jack French, executive director of Pasadena Tournament of Roses Assn.

But the majority of bowl associations are not in that enviable position because of pressure they put upon themselves to stage as big a spectacle as possible.

“I doubt most bowls could afford the payout based solely on TV rights fees,” said NBC’s Miller. “And it’s the payout that helps attract the team to the bowl.”

Bowl associations get the majority of their revenues from four sources: the TV rights contract, title sponsors, membership fees and ticket sales.

They pay a university anywhere from $600,000 to, in the case of the Rose Bowl, $6.3 million per team in each bowl game--by far the largest item in the associations’ budgets. And competition for teams is fierce, since the better the matchup, the higher the ratings and the greater the advertising and ticket sales.

“The money is the primary factor in who goes where after the conference affiliations,” says Loren Mathews, senior vice president of programming at cable TV sports channel ESPN.

The networks, however, have been paying less for TV rights to bowl games because they no longer attract the big ratings due to so many matchups on at the same time. So the associations have turned to title sponsors to pick up the slack. Although frequently one of the teams in any bowl matchup is there because it ranks at the top of its conference or league, the opponent is usually there because it was able to strike a lucrative deal with the local bowl association.

Payouts weigh heavily for teams in deciding which bowl to play, said John Reid, executive director of the San Diego Bowl Game Assn., organizer of the Sea World Holiday Bowl. In addition, there is internal pressure “among bowl games to move up in the pecking order to attract better teams.”

Such is the goal of the Orange County Sports Assn., which puts on the Freedom Bowl in Anaheim.

“If we could land a corporate sponsor, we could increase our payout to $850,000 from $600,000,” said Rob Halvaks, associate director of the association. “Right now, our teams, which are Oregon and Colorado State, are 8-3 and 8-4, respectively. But if we could increase our payments we’d be able to attract teams that have 9 wins.” The growing number of bowl games and the ever-increasing amounts paid out to the teams is occuring despite evidence the public is unwilling to support them all.

The Rose Bowl, for instance, used to regularly attract at least 20% of the entire TV audience, but in recent years has slipped to about 15%. None of the other New Year’s Day bowl games attract more than 10% of the audience at any one time. “I don’t think any of these bowl games are on the air because viewers wish to see them,” says ABC’s Ritter. “They are there for the kids playing football and the communities hosting them.”

BOWLING FOR DOLLARSTotal annual amounts paid out to individual college football teams in post-season bowl games.

BOWL PAYOUTS 1985-86: $41.6 million 1986-87: $46.9 million 1987-88: $49.7 million 1988-89: $53.9 million 1989-90: $58.7 million