How much does it cost to win a college football game?

For the Nebraska Cornhuskers, $2.4 million equaled three wins. For the No. 5 Texas Longhorns, $1.8 million did the trick. And for the Kansas Jayhawks, $1.5 million brought three home wins.

With the goal of six wins and bowl eligibility becoming the norm in college football, more big time college football programs are “buying” games against smaller non-conference schools to entice them to travel to play. The practice, which involves a bigger school paying a large sum of money to a smaller school if it travels to play a game, is a win-win situation for both schools involved.

The smaller schools receive a large payday that, in some cases, helps fund a large portion of its athletics department budget. It also gets the experience of playing in front of a sold-out crowd against a bigger, better team that will help it prepare for the rest of the season.

“We’re very dependent on them to be competitive and do the things that we need to do,” Donnie Cox, associate athletics director at Northwestern State University, said of the guaranteed money to play those games. “This money doesn’t just go to football, it goes to all of the sports. One game can be several hundred thousand dollars. That’s a lot of scholarships.”

Schools such as Kansas that pay smaller schools to come and play are almost guaranteed to win the game. They are also able to start the season without playing any serious competition and can work on things that will help later in the season. It also helps add to the team’s victory total and, once conference play begins, means it needs to win fewer games to become eligible for a bowl game.

Bigger and richer schools pay teams with a slim chance of winning a large sum of money to come and get beaten.

Kansas has bought several games recently including three this season. The Jayhawks paid Florida International and Louisiana Tech $600,000 each to travel to Lawrence to play. Sam Houston State, a Division 1-AA team, was paid $285,000 by Kansas for its game.

“The price has gone up enormously in the last couple of years,” said associate athletics director Larry Keating, who schedules games for both the football and basketball teams at Kansas.

Because the smaller schools try to fund a large portion of their budget from these games, they often to try to schedule games as geographically close as possible to help travel arrangements for both the team and their fans.

“We try to play someone in our region to keep the travel costs down because the net profit will be more,” Cox said, who negotiated a deal with Kansas to receive $275,000 in return for a 48-18 loss at Kansas in 2006. “The kids like to play those games because they like to try and prove that they can compete at that level. It’s a challenge for them and its exciting for them to play those schools.”

While schools are dependent on these large checks, some schools such as North Texas would rather be the one making the payment and not the one being paid.

“We don’t like being in a non-competitive situation where we are having to force our guys to play a team that obviously is going to be loaded compared to us,” said Hank Dickenson, Deputy Athletic Director at North Texas and a 1987 KU graduate. “But as a mid-major football program trying to get better, the reality is, one of those games is something that we need.”

Some Division 1-AA schools or smaller Division 1-A schools used to play as many as four of these games a season in order to fund their budget. But a new rule now forces each team to play a minimum of five home games each season which limits the number of these types of games they can play.

That makes it much tougher for bigger schools such as Kansas to find teams willing to come play because the number of teams looking for games has gone down significantly.

Kansas will pay Northern Colorado $375,000 dollars to open the season in Lawrence next year.

“It’s become very competitive because there are less games out there available for guarantees,” Keating said. “It’s rare to find someone who sells two games. More and more teams are only playing one of those games where they may have used to play three of them. I think back three or four years ago, there may have been 90 games available to be bought and now that number is a lot less.”

It also means that the price for each game has greatly increased because the larger schools have to become the highest bidder for a smaller team. While the bigger schools try and get smaller schools to schedule the games in advance, many smaller schools will wait as late as possible to try and find a team willing to pay top dollar for their services.

“Most of the teams that sell games don’t do it in advance,” Keating said. “They will typically wait until a year before or even the spring before because they know that they can get the higher price or highest guarantee the longer they wait. It’s just common sense to just sit back and wait. You’ll get a game.”

Nebraska ranked second in the nation by shelling out 2.725 million dollars for four home games. They paid three opponents — Western Michigan, San Jose State and New Mexico State — more than $800,000 each to travel to Lincoln and get beat soundly by the Cornhuskers.

Texas had the highest single-game payout, sending $900,000 to Florida Atlantic in exchange for a 52-10 beating of the Owls.

“It just pretty much depends on when you made the game,” Keating said of the price. “If you made the game three or four years ago, it might be 450 or 500 thousand, but if you made the game in the spring when you were desperate, then it could be another hundred thousand or so.”

The alternative to guarantee games is to schedule series in which each team would travel to play the other team an equal number of times. Kansas has series with Duke, Southern Mississippi and UTEP starting next season. Kansas will host SMU in 2009 and travel to play there in 2010 while UTEP will wait a year to make its return trip to Lawrence in 2011. Kansas has also scheduled a series against Rice which will begin in 2012.

Most schools don’t exchange money with the opposing schools because the money ends up equaling out in the end. Kansas and South Florida, which finished a series this year, each paid the visiting team $150,000 to help pay for travel expenses.

Keating has completed the 2009 Kansas football schedule and hopes to have 2010-2012 completed before the end of the year. He is looking to find three teams for series, the first of which would come during the 2010-2011 seasons. Keating hopes to have three home games and one road game during each non-conference season.

“We’ve probably bought more games than we would normally the last couple of years, but that was just an effort to help us get our head above the water,” Keating said. “Now that we’ve gotten better and will hopefully stabilize and stay that way, you’re probably going to see a little bit better quality of teams because the home and homes tend to be better teams.”

— - Edited by Arthur Hur