O'Leary gets 10 year deal

[bulls96go]

this is a dumb move. IMHO.

where is the $$$ coming from??

CUSA?

when we were there we could not afford to pay $1M

what gives?

Cusa bowl money...NOT!!!

Jack Bogaczyk  

Daily Mail Sports Editor  

Thursday May 25, 2006  

ONE bottom line on Conference USA football for its first season since reorganization?  

Well, if you're looking for green, try the home jerseys of Marshall, UAB and Tulane. They were half of the C-USA teams that didn't reach bowl games.  

Their staying home isn't why the postseason was written in red ink for the Dallas-based conference. Now, the league is trying to read between the dollar signs.  

The final figures on the 2005-06 season are in, and the NCAA's bowl financial review has C-USA alone among the 11 Division I-A conferences in losing money on the bowl season.  

C-USA had six bids, getting an extra in a Motor City berth (Memphis) the Big Ten couldn't fill. For those six games and a token $1.050 million distribution from the Bowl Championship Series, C-USA's revenue was just over $5.658 million.  

The expenditures, however, created a loss of $578,494. That's a C-USA responsibility, not passed on to the dozen members.  

"Sometimes," said Alfred White, C-USA's associate commissioner for football operations, "you wind up upside down on things like this, but another way to look at the bottom line is that it's a net positive for our schools to have these bowl partnerships."  

Translated: if C-USA doesn't pay it, the Big East or ACC or Mountain West or Mid-American will.  

Gee, even the Sun Belt, regarded as the bottom rung in I-A, made a reported profit of $790,106. The Big Six? Don't even ask. The lowest profit margin among those BCS-bloated conferences was in the Big East, at $15 million and change.  

The reason the C-USA lost financially in going 3-3 on the field has more to do with how it handles bowl revenue and expenses -- and a change (likely a needed one) may be coming on the issue at the next meeting of the conference's university presidents.  

Conferences handle bowl financial responsibilities in different fashion. In C-USA, the conference office takes on the responsibility of contracted ticket commitments and title sponsor payments. The participating schools, however, keep the ticket revenue.  

It's been a nice deal if you could get it, but White said C-USA is considering "a couple of different things on the table," including a reimbursement policy to schools for actual expenses, and then a division (among 12 schools) of revenues.  

You can look at the current system as a carrot for success. Win, go to a bowl, sell more than 10,000 tickets as C-USA champ Tulsa did to the Liberty, and you keep the bucks.  

However, the ticket commitments for C-USA from six games last December totaled $3.7 million. That was a large chunk of C-USA's expense line that also included shipping league runner-up Central Florida to the Hawaii Bowl.  

Another recent development in the sanctioning of bowls is how the NCAA contributed to C-USA's reported red ink.  

Despite what you may have read after recent bowl expansion about a required minimum payout of $750,000 per team, the NCAA ditched that commandment two years ago.  

This past December, C-USA received only $325,000 for the New Orleans Bowl (transplanted to Lafayette, La., by hurricanes) and $425,000 from the Hawaii Bowl.  

Yes, if you do the math, you see that's two bowls for the former price of one.  

The plus in C-USA's immediate future is two-fold:  

It has landed an annual spot (against the Big East) in the new Birmingham Bowl, which makes about as much geographic sense as possible. The league's four core bowls are now in Memphis, Mobile, Birmingham and New Orleans.  

Instead of doling out for a team to go to Hawaii every year, it is alternating between Honolulu and the Fort Worth Bowl over a four-season span. Houston is a 1-in-4 proposition, if the red-inked game remains afloat.  

"Some of what you see in that calculation goes back to the business deals conferences do with the bowls to make them work," said White, noting C-USA has given the new Birmingham game a 10,000-ticket commitment, or $400,000.  

C-USA Commissioner Britton Banowsky has said repeatedly that the conference's bowl revenue plan "is difficult and a challenge," White said. "We also understand how important bowls are to our members."  

Yeah, but kind of like the Rolling Stones, White sees a red line and he wants to paint it black.  

[DawgPound]

Apparently, UCF can.  Get over it.

[MavTechKNIGHT2]

You couldn't afford 1 mil because your guy didn't deserve it.

He still doesn't.

For any Bull to question GO as a coach is funny since Leavitt has proved NOTHING.

[DawgPound]

He's(Leavitt) proven that giving hugs means bad apples can remain in the program.

Unless you're Johnny Peyton, who couldn't understand that being in a I-A program means you need a good work ethic.

[Triple B]

For any Bull to question GO as a coach is funny...

Forget the Bulls questioning him as a coach. Someone in your athletic department deemed it necessary to give him an incentive clause for winning 6 freaking games ....... talk about mixed signals.

[MavTechKNIGHT2]

Forget the Bulls questioning him as a coach. Someone in your athletic department deemed it necessary to give him an incentive clause for winning 6 freaking games ....... talk about mixed signals.

The incentive is a direct payment for GO getting us bowl eligible and going to a bowl game.  Of course, under normal circumstances, that would mean UCF is making money.

Is it THAT hard to understand?

[twillybull]

I still bet my bottom dollar that red-nosed drunk would jump ship to coach in a BCS school.  The only problem is that no BCS school would touch Mr. Resume with a 10 foot pole.  UCF didn't need to spend that kind of money to lock him up.  Great move guys, great move...

[___ Eats It]

I still bet my bottom dollar that red-nosed drunk would jump ship to coach in a BCS school.  The only problem is that no BCS school would touch Mr. Resume with a 10 foot pole.  UCF didn't need to spend that kind of money to lock him up.  Great move guys, great move...

Negotiating against themselves again, as usual....