By the time the 2009 football season rolled around, the University of Minnesota hadn't won a Big 10 title in 42 years. The Gophers had largely spent those decades serving as target practice for the league's higher powers, but they weren't without occasional bursts of second-string glory.
That season Minnesota finished 6-6, collecting the minimum wins needed to earn a slot in the Insight Bowl in Tempe, Arizona.
Their bragging rights would be slender. Every year, 70 of Division I football's 120 teams get bowl invitations, making faceless games like the Insight akin to summer camp participation awards. Minnesota would face Iowa State, another 6-6 team from the Big 12. The teams were charged with providing three hours of TV programming for hard-core fans and shut-ins just before New Year's. The ratings would be measured in decimal points.
But within the Minnesota football offices in Minneapolis, there was cause for celebration, however muted. Though the game orbited well outside the realm of consequence, it was still a chance to reward players, boast to recruits, liquor up boosters and feed a small army of university suits with a paid vacation in the Arizona sun.
The accounting office no doubt held a much different view. It surely knew that, like nearly all bowls, the Insight was designed to plunder all it could from the college treasury.
The bloodbath began the moment the contract was signed. Minnesota was obligated to write a check for 10,000 tickets, which were supposed to be resold to fans. Never mind that even the best teams struggle to unload such sums. For middling squads like the Gophers, it was nothing more than a way for the men in funny yellow blazers who ran the Insight to grab piles of money from a public university.
Minnesota managed to sell just 901 seats. After kicking another 900 to the band, administrators and cherished hangers-on, the school was forced to eat $476,000 worth of useless tickets. The contract also required the team to show up a week early, if only to burn as much school money as possible at the restaurants and retailers of Greater Phoenix.
One would think school administrators would protest such gall. But one would be wrong. They were quick to see the advantages of a luxury vacation on the school's dime. So they happily signed off.
The school's traveling party was larded up with 722 people, including players, band members and faculty. Airfare alone ran $542,000. Toss in hotels and meals, and the school had blown $1.3 million before the opening kickoff.
The ballsiest part of all: None of it was remotely necessary.
Minnesota and Iowa State sit less than 200 miles apart. Their teams were providing the game; their bands would provide the halftime entertainment. In fact, the Insight offered nothing — save for warm weather — that the schools couldn't have done better themselves. Had the game been played in Minneapolis, the teams could have sold more tickets and put on a profitable game, as Big 10 matches typically generate $1 to $2 million — not knee-bending losses.
Yet none of this was ever considered. Thanks to an alliance of unblushing incompetence and corruption, college football long ago decided to outsource its most valuable asset: its postseason earnings. The scheme plays out each year on the ostensibly pristine fields of amateur athletics. Bowl executives grant themselves breathtaking salaries. The games, meanwhile, provide coaches, athletic directors and the suits who nominally supervise them with an unending stream of bonuses.
And everyone else picks up the tab.
