College athletes aren’t paid because they are “amateurs,” but during the bowl season, some $5.4 million will be spent on “gifts” for bowl game participants.
The NCAA will slam dunk players and programs if the wrong guy buys a student-athlete a sandwich, but getting more than $1,300 in gifts for going to a bowl game is cool.
Sports Business Daily reported that there will be at least $5.4 million spent this year on gifts for this season’s batch of bowl game participants.
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The NCAA allows each bowl to award up to $550 in gifts to up to 125 participants per school. Those participants can also receive up to $400 in gifts from their schools and up to $400 in gifts from their conferences for postseason play, including conference championship games and bowl games.
And with the rise in popularly of gift suites, players have a lot more choices in what sort of swag they take home.
Gift suites are private events prior to the game where players—and other VIPS—can fill out an order form to select a gift or gifts up to a predetermined value.
Half of those gift suites are held in the host city of the bowl, while others are staged by the bowl committees on the campus of the participating school.
And there is a company in Texas that handles most of this.
Performance Award Center in Carrollton, Texas, will be sending a shipment of speakers, bikes, blenders, remote-control helicopters, headphones and other items to the University of Utah and Colorado State University, the participants in the Las Vegas Bowl.
A gift suite will be held Wednesday on one campus by the bowl committee and on Thursday at the other.
The most-ordered item last year, according to Performance Award Center official Jon Cooperstein, was a powered home-theater recliner that includes two USB ports for charging mobile devices. Some 1,500 of the chairs were shipped last year as part of gift suites.
Seems like a heckuva deal for the guys in the bowls—which this year includes 76 of the 120 FBS programs in the nation.
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