Griftonomics, college bowl game edition

College football bowl games — postseason made for TV exhibition matches that have become, from a competitive perspective, even more painfully and boringly superfluous now that the sport’s championship is decided by a playoff system — are especially absurd examples of how the unpaid labor of “amateur” athletes generates billions of dollars of revenue, which is then expropriated by various other people, some of who appear to be Marxist comic book versions of pure social parasites.  Like this guy:

Today the Washington Post published a story on Jim McVay, the guy whose only job is to run a lower-tier college bowl game, and the million dollars he makes for doing it. The report, which points out how the $1,045,000 McVay made in 2017 “ranks as extreme” even in the bloated business of college football and how the bowl McVay runs also stands out for how little it donates to charity, is reminiscent of a report by the Tampa Bay Times that was published around this time last year. The Tampa Bay Times story echoes one from CBS Sports from 2014, which sounds a lot like this one USA Today published in 2012, which isn’t that different from one by the San Diego Union-Tribune that was published way back in 2007.

McVay, a former Buccaneers marketing executive and uncle to Los Angeles Rams Coach Sean McVay, was the highest-paid bowl executive in the country in 2017, the most recent year financial records are available, even though his organization’s revenue that year — $11.9 million — ranked 10th among bowl organizations. While several bowl bosses manage other games or major events, McVay’s core duties remain as focused as they were when he took the job in 1988: negotiate contracts and sell sponsorships and tickets for one football game each year.

Nice “work” if you can get it!

One heartening development is the growing trend among players to skip out on these games, to protect themselves from injury prior to attempting to sell their labor for the money a few of them can go on to earn in explicitly professional football.

Of course a lot of fans consider this kind of behavior rather — what’s the word I’m looking for — oh yeah, a bit uppity.