The Ducks’ appearance in the 2002 Tostitos Fiesta Bowl secured $2.2 million for the Athletic Department and enough tortilla chips and tangy salsa to supply the snacks for one massive Super Bowl party.
“We had way too many Tostitos,” said Tom Larson, director of finance and contracts for athletics, who attended the Jan. 1 Fiesta Bowl with colleagues and regularly raided the Ducks’ complimentary cornucopia of chips and dips.
But like the chips, which disappeared after steady sampling from Duck players, coaches and administrators, much of the $2,210,000 has been consumed to cover expenses.
Athletic directors have already earmarked and allocated the BCS cash into the operating budget to cover expenses, such as uniforms, coaches’ salaries and student-athlete financial aid.
“That’s a building block to set up the budget. It’s expected,” Associate Athletic Director Dave Heeke said.
The Athletic Department’s operating budget is $29 million this year, BCS cash included. Larson said the department lumps the BCS money into its general fund, and at that point, the directors can’t track what each BCS dollar finances in the department.
“All of our income comes into the same general fund, and all of our expenses come out of the same fund,” Larson said. “There’s no way anybody can relate a particular dollar of income to a particular dollar of expense.”

Share and share alike
Oregon’s BCS payments are influenced by much more than the final score or the team’s final poll ranking.
The total revenue for 2002 BCS games is $75 million, the largest chunks of which are divided into six “base shares” — an equal amount to each conference that has a team in the BCS’s Fiesta, Sugar and Orange bowls.
This year’s Fiesta Bowl generated an $11,787,000 base share for each team in the Pacific-10 and Big 12 conferences.
The Rose Bowl, which hosted this year’s National Championship, has a separate contract and pays its participants directly when Pasadena hosts a non-BCS game. Then, according to BCS rules, the conferences split the money among the schools in the conferences — the “member share.” Each Pac-10 and Big 12 school will receive a member share of slightly more than $1 million this year.
“Every conference has a different distribution scheme,” Rose Bowl CEO Mitch Dorger said. “The Pac-10 is a ‘full-share’ conference, meaning whatever comes in is divided by a certain number and allocated in an equal share.”
The Big 12 also is a full-share conference, Dorger said.
Besides payments to teams and conferences, the BCS contributes $4.2 million of the total sum to Division I and II conferences to ensure college football’s overall health. The BCS also pays $100,000 to the foundation that manages the weekly BCS rankings — the National Football Foundation and College Hall of Fame.
BCS revenues, which come from ABC Sports and the bowl executives, are more lucrative than payments from non-BCS bowls, Cotton Bowl spokesman Michael Konradi said.
“This year, our payout was approximately $2.5 million (base share) to each team,” he said. “It’s the second highest payout of a non-BCS bowl behind the Citrus, but it’s significantly less than what the Ducks made for going to the Fiesta.”
But the BCS also awards a flat payout — the “participation share” — to the teams just for making it to the bowl game.
Heeke said the University’s participation share was about $1.1 million, and nearly all of it paid for Fiesta Bowl travel expenses such as hotels, a chartered plane and, chips aside, meals.

Player perks
But it was tough to put the chips aside this year at the Fiesta Bowl, if only because of availability and sheer volume, Athletic Department officials said.
Each bowl generally awards participating student athletes with gifts, but the decadence of those gifts has limits.
Under NCAA rules, a bowl must limit its gifts to each player participating in its shindig to $300. For the Ducks, that meant Fiesta Bowl T-shirts, jackets, and the aforementioned, corn-based hors d’oeuvres.
“As with most rules, we try to set a standard for everyone,” NCAA spokeswoman Jane Jankowski said. “If there’s no limit, you create a competition that we prefer not to have, with one sponsor trying to outdo another.”