Notre Dame: To Receive Highest BCS Bowl Payout

If you tuned in to this weekend’s NCAA college football games you witnessed some pretty exciting matchups. Being the final week of regular season play, many of the game results will end up having championship implications. No win was bigger on Saturday than that of the Notre Dame Fighting Irish. The 22-13 victory over Southern California capped the Irish’s first unbeaten season since 1988. With most seniors usually being around 22 or 23 years old, I would venture to say many, if not all, of the Notre Dame roster was not alive back in 1988. Outside of Ohio State, who is banned from postseason play this year, Notre Dame is the only undefeated team, so they will be heading to the BCS National Championship game in January to likely face the winner of the SEC Championship.

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So what does this mean in terms of BCS bowl payouts? Well every football program in the nation is trying to get their teams in the hunt for a spot in a BCS bowl game because of the huge BCS bowl payouts those promoters and sponsors pay to the schools. If you are unfamiliar with the four BCS bowl games, they are the Rose Bowl, Orange Bowl, Sugar Bowl, and Fiesta Bowl. Then of course the top two ranked teams play in the BCS National Championship.  Most teams who reach these games receive over $23 million just to participate. Notre Dame, however, is a little bit different because they do not play in any BCS conference, such as the SEC, ACC, PAC-12, or otherwise. Notre Dame is an independent, and because of this status they are only to receive $6.2 million for their participation this year. Now, if you are thinking this is an unfair take for the Irish you’ll soon see why its not. 

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Conferences who qualify have provisions that force bowl money to be shared among all conference members after expenses, such as travel, are taken out. So, for instance, if Florida makes it to the Sugar Bowl, then other in-conference teams like LSU and Arkansas will see a pay day as well because they are members of the same conference. Notre Dame on the other hand keeps it all for themselves. A recent article in ESPN explained how this worked last year for the SEC:

The conference bowl distribution to each school was $2.85 million, bolstered by both Alabama and LSU making the title game, which brought in an extra $6.2 million to the conference for Alabama’s at-large selection. Alabama and LSU kept $1.9 million each for participating in the national championship game, meaning each would have earned $4.8 million.

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And, that only happened because both schools in last year’s championship game were in the same conference. So, win or lose Notre Dame will be laughing all the way to the bank with the biggest BCS haul yet.

For more information about the Bowl Championship Series and its rankings visit www.bcsfootball.org