Fossil, Inc. is a three billion dollar a year company that employs over ten thousand employees. They are, as far as I know, the biggest and most important maker of watches that an aunt gives you when you're eight and not quite old enough for a watch but too young to realize that there are clocks literally everywhere and wearing a watch is more or less pointless.
So you grudgingly wear your symbol of western decadence, feeling guilty about the $89.95 that your dad's guileless sister plunked down and attached to your tiny, girlish wrist.
Well congratulations, me from 20 years ago! That timepiece that you've just realized doesn't have enough holes to fit any better than "pray for puberty," now makes you a part of the proud tradition of college bowl gift baskets and the Fossil watches that make up about 75% of the monetary value of them.
That's a little bit of hyperbole (Fossil watches can be found in a mere 15 of the 41 bowl's gift baskets), but it's a little weird that the prize packages that accompany playing in bowl games read like Olmec consoling runner-up teams on Legends of the Hidden Temple. Josten's, Oakley, Timley Watches, Outback Steakhouse, and whatever the hell a Belk is are all well represented in the parade of presents that college football players are forced (with extreme prejudice) to turn down the other 364 days of the year but wholeheartedly encouraged to accept and display on the 365th.
For a maximum for $550 dollars per player, companies that make most of their revenue at mall kiosks and guys in alleyways going "C'mere man, 'ey, c'mere" get an enormous amount of free advertising by way of Tweets and Instagram shots and sarcastic blog posts. The schools themselves can throw in some nice swag themselves, and by the end of everything players might walk away with close to one thousand dollars worth of... stuff. Thanks to SportsBusinessDaily we can compare and contrast said stuff, and I personally think that the Alamo Bowl wins this season with a GoPro and a panoramic photo of lovely, uh, San Antonio.
And you know what? Thank God for this mountain of crap, this pile of mostly useless merchandise that helps fund more bowls and more gift baskets.
Because without it, how would some families ever know that their sons ever participated in a post-season bowl?
Earlier this week on the Eleven Dubcast, Michael and I talked to Buckeye parents Stacy Elliot and Annie Apple about the burden that's been placed on families to go to bowl games. Currently, Ohio State will give the parents of players an 800 dollar stipend to spend toward bowl travel expenses, which is the maximum allowed under the NCAA's rules. Both Stacey and Annie get the impression that the university would like to provide more, but they're hamstrung by archaic rules created when blimp travel was an exciting prospect for the future.
800 dollars isn't nothing, and most southern schools don't have to worry quite as much about travel expenses to bowl games as their correct side of the Mason-Dixon Line counterparts, so maybe in the eyes of the NCAA this is a niche issue. And maybe the Hawaii Bowl doesn't genuinely expect too many people to make the journey from Houston to Honolulu this season. But the Sugar Bowl sure as hell does, and God forbid the Buckeyes actually win that game, because families will be forced to figure out which teeth fillings to sell to get to Arlington, Texas.
"OH IT'S NOT THAT BAD!" said thousands of internet commenters/millionaires. Really?
That's what a round trip ticket from Columbus to New Orleans looks like on the 31st. Obviously fares will be different for families depending on where they're living, but the point is that parents will be expected to plunk down at least 1-2 large to get everyone on a plane for one game. That's to say nothing of lodging, meals, mace to fend off hedonistic Alabama fans, and any number of other travel expenses that will have to be covered. The end result is that a family of four is looking at spending thousands of dollars to travel to one game, with another possibly looming on the horizon.
Ohio State, the bowls, and the Big Ten at large have the means to help. Let's allot two thousand dollars in travel expenses for 100 player families per bowl team. That's more families than players that will actually go to the game, but screw it. The B1G somehow got ten teams into bowls this year, so that's a cool two million dollars to cover at least some of the travel expenses for everyone, according to my half-assed math.
Two million dollars is a huge chunk of change to most of us, but keep in mind that the Big Ten split almost forty-seven million dollars in bowl money last year, to the tune of 2.8 million per university. Now understand that the conference already spent over 13 million dollars in bowl travel-related expenses in 2013, and you begin to understand that maybe two million dollars, while still a lot of money to be giving out to families, is still completely and utterly doable for the powers-that-be. That is to say nothing of the potential contributions of the bowls themselves and their sponsors.
The money is there, and families of players shouldn't victims of the success of their children. By not finding a workable solution to help families, the NCAA is essentially daring them to go outside the system to support their kids.
Urban Meyer addressed this shortly after finding out that his team was headed to the Sugar Bowl.
"You know what my biggest thing (is)? What are we going to do with our players' families?" he said. "People are all worried about the playoff and who's going to play who. (But) how is that mom and dad or mom and uncle going to go see their kid play?"
Gene Smith added that he'll try and convince the NCAA to legislate some help for families, so that should get done sometime in the 2020s, and by then football will be dead and replaced in America by an uncontrollable cricket craze.
Maybe, just maybe, companies like Fossil (three billion in revenue, remember?) and Allstate (32 billion) and AutoZone (nine billion) and Hyundai (86 billion) might be able to shell out some cash to help the people who need it. And if they can't, if Bitcoin or the San Diego Credit Union finds out that they can't meet that obligation, then maybe that bowl isn't all that useful to anyone. Waiting for the world's most obtuse organization to create a rule to help out people who need it is a fool's errand; Gene Smith and Urban talking about this issue publicly is a start, but it's up to guys like Jim Delany to push for change. That's when things will improve.
Still though, it's hard not to think about how players will look cool as hell in a shiny new Fossil watch. But I just can't help but think that most players would trade most of what's in their gift baskets for their families being able to watch them play without taking out a second mortgage on their house.
