January 8, 2009 10:20AM

Enjoy the Bowls–You’re Paying for Them

By David Boaz

In the Wall Street Journal, Mark Yost explores the taxpayer subsidies to major college football bowl games:

while everyone’s fretting over the bailout package for the auto industry, most taxpayers would be shocked to learn that they’re also footing the bill for some of these highly profitable bowl games. From 2001 to 2005, seven tax‐​exempt bowls received $21.6 million in government aid.

During that time, 38 percent of the Brut Sun Bowl’s revenue came from a Texas rental‐​car tax. Now that’s Brutish.


And what do the bowls do with those taxpayer dollars? Well, they put on a football extravaganza, of course. But also:

To ensure the bowl games maintain their tax‐​exempt status, the committees hire state and federal lobbyists. Watts Partners, the Washington, D.C., lobbying firm run by former University of Oklahoma quarterback and Rep. J.C. Watts, has been paid more than $500,000 in consulting fees by the BCS.

So, as happens with many other government‐​funded enterprises, taxpayers’ money is spent on lobbyists to keep the taxpayers’ money flowing. Some of the money also goes to pay bowl executives upwards of $400,000. Leaving aside the issue of why tax‐​funded entities should pay their executives more than the president of the United States, I’m not surprised that bowl committees pay a CEO a handsome salary to make everything work perfectly. But I wonder: We hear a lot of complaints about the high pay of corporate CEOs. If the executive director of a $30 million bowl game is paid $400,000, how much should the CEO of a $30 billion company get?


More on taxpayer subsidies for sports business here and here. A lengthy bibliography here (pdf).