Maybe College Football Isn’t All That It’s Cracked Up to Be

The popular belief that big time college football pays not only for itself but also for numerous other men’s and women’s sports is not only incorrect, according to one researcher, it doesn’t even come close to the truth.

Donna Lopiano, executive director of the Women’s Sports Foundation, recently wrote an article for the Chronicle of Higher Education and pointed out that:

--At 93% of all NCAA institutions, football not only does not pay for women’s sports, it doesn’t pay for itself.

--Almost half of all Division I-A football programs are running deficits averaging $638,000 annually. Further, 94% of Division I-AA football programs are running deficits averaging $535,000.

Lopiano adds that women make up less than 33% of all college athletes and receive 33% of the total scholarship dollars. But women’s intercollegiate athletics, she writes, receive only 24% of overall sports operating budgets and 18% of recruiting budgets.

Lopiano also writes: “Intercollegiate men’s football and basketball programs have fallen victim to excess.

“They have engaged in a spending war that has resulted in country club-style locker rooms, indoor football practice facilities (for an outdoor sport whose athletes are allowed to practice only from August to December and for 15 days in the spring), expensive videotape production and editing facilities, first-class hotel accommodations on the night before home football games and elaborate team meeting and training-table facilities.”

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Trivia time: What was the site of the only Super Bowl played in Texas?

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Cover charge: American Express platinum card-holders began receiving invitations to a Super Bowl party this week.

The invitations offer card-holders an opportunity to “meet and mingle” with “NFL greats.” Which “NFL greats?”

Joe Namath and Gale Sayers, among others, an American Express spokeswoman said.

Platinum card-holders are folks with exceptional credit ratings. So this party is a reward for paying their bills on time, right?

Uh, not exactly.

Price per person: $2,200.

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Ole! Of all the special-interest groups delighted that the Super Bowl on Jan. 31 will be played in Pasadena, none is happier than the California Avocado Commission.

Why?

Guacamole.

“No other single American event impacts the sale of avocados like the Super Bowl,” said Mark Affieck, the commission president. “In fact, Super Bowl week trails only Cinco de Mayo as the most important week of the year for California avocados.”

The commission predicts that during Super Bowl week, football fans nationwide will buy 30 million avocados and turn them into 12 million pounds of guacamole.

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Changing times: For the 1984 Olympics, the Los Angeles Olympic Organizing Committee sold corporate sponsorships for $4 million each. For the Atlanta Games of 1996, the “top tier” sponsorship tab is $40 million.

Only four “top tiers” have been sold--to IBM, Coca-Cola, Nations Bank, and Home Depot, according to the Amateur Athletic Foundation of Los Angeles.

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TV man: During a recent Rams’ broadcast, announcers Paul Olden and Jack Snow were discussing retired Ram kicker Mike Lansford.

Olden: “Mike is working in television now.”

Snow: “He sure is. He has about 300 sets in his garage.”

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Trivia answer: Rice University Stadium in Houston, in 1974.

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Quotebook: Former boxing champion Willie Pep, explaining why he not only didn’t pick up a trophy after being inducted into the Connecticut Sports Hall of Fame but instead asked for $1,000: “I got a roomful of trophies. I want a purse.”