Gateway Pushes a Publicity Playoff

Talk about a Hail Mary.

Ted Waitt’s first longshot play was to found computer maker Gateway Inc. in an Iowa farmhouse. Now he’s got another one: spending at least $30 million to sponsor a football matchup between USC and Louisiana State in hopes of boosting sales of the company’s plasma TVs.

“It’s a very solid business proposition,” Waitt said Thursday.

With Gateway losing money for the third straight year, you’d think the chief executive would have more on his mind than college football. The Poway, Calif.-based company has $1 billion in cash, but analysts weren’t ready to wave their pompoms.

“It’s an interesting publicity play,” said Roger Kay of IDC. “But once you’ve spent the money, what do you get out of it?”

Waitt contacted USC President Steven B. Sample and LSU Chancellor Mark Emmert, offering $10 million in scholarships to each school if their teams would meet on the gridiron and another $10 million to the winning school.

Plenty of football fanatics have been clamoring for a USC-LSU face-off ever since USC finished the season atop the Associated Press poll and LSU won the Bowl Championship Series title. Only a playoff would satisfy purists.

Will it happen? “It’s not really something we can enter into,” Emmert said. USC declined to comment.

But Waitt already is planning to broadcast the game in HDTV format and to stream it on the Internet.

“Give me one good reason this can’t happen,” Waitt said. “It’s just football.”