Justifying Big Money

$500 worth of swag?

Many times I straddle the fine line that separates the "haves" in college from the "have nots." On the one hand, I work with scholarship athletes who work diligently for their scholarship money, but on the other hand, I also deal with students who work at Applebee's for their tuition. I even got a lesson in economics from a person who worked in the computer lab and indicated that the price of fruit was just too much for her to afford. Now, I carry an apple in my backpack if I'm going to the lab just in case she's working. Without fail, though, students who are not scholarship athletes are more than a little angry/envious about what they perceive to be an inequitable distribution of funds...and we don't even have football at our school.
Since it's the bowl season for college football and holiday tournament season for basketball, athletes get extra benefits that "regular' students can only dream of.
Basketball teams get to spend a week in Hawaii or the Caribbean, getting gifts in addition. It might be a video camera and a backpack or a new pair of shoes and a watch for the hoopsters, but the real swag is handed out to college football players lucky enough to make it to a bowl game, even if it's a smaller game in terms of prestige like, say, the Chick-fil-A Bowl. Football players walk away with a veritable treasure trove of, well, treasure.
By NCAA regulation, players are not allowed to get "gifts" worth more than $500 for a bowl appearance...that's in addition to the $350 worth of stuff their universities can provide each player. X-boxes were common the last few years, but so many players already had one, the bowl organizers had to get creative. Some, like the Chick-fil-A Bowl send out questionnaires and interview players as to what exactly they would like to get. Gift cards have become popular, and Best Buy seems to be the one most treasured by athletes (since they can't get "real" cash as amateurs). IPods and Fossil watches are also popular gifts as are the video cameras that attach via USB to a computer, better to post those videos for friends who aren't so lucky. And, of course, the bigger the bowl game, the more ostentatious the swag--within legal limits, of course. And remember, athletes are not allowed to sell any of the stuff they get (see Ohio State football for clarification)
So, if you were in uniform for this year's Chick-fil-A Bowl, you would receive (in addition to getting to spend a week or so practicing in warm weather and eating at fancy hotels or restaurants every meal), a travel bag, a souvenir football, a $250 gift card from Best Buy, a Fossil watch, and a Chick-fil-A calendar. A calendar? Organizers must have come up a few bucks short.
Anyway, it's hard for me to defend such exorbitant expenditures in an economy teetering perilously on the brink of disaster; however, when one considers that Ohio State University spends upwards of $70 million dollars on a football budget, maybe the expenses really are not all that exorbitant at all.
Game on!