Why do teams keep coming back to bowl games despite regularly losing money on the trips?

Much of it has to do with image, but as Brent Schrotenboer of the San Diego Union-Tribune writes, it also has to do with the way the system works.

As this site noted last week, once a team accepts an invitation to a bowl game, it also agrees to purchase an allotment of tickets. This ticket revenue is critical to not only helping the bowl system survive, but thrive. In 1996-97, there was only 18 bowls. Today there are 34.

Teams usually fall short of selling all of the tickets and are stuck with a loss that sometimes tops $1 million. But teams then pass the losses to their conference, whichs pool all the postseason monies and distributes it to league teams. This money often covers the losses from unsold tickets. Last year, expenses for the 67 bowl participants were $80 million, which included $15.53 million in unsold tickets.

"The bowls are a money-laundering system, in which one school may fall
on the economic sword and buy these tickets, knowing it will recoup
this over time," Richard Southall, director of the College Sport
Research Institute at the University of North Carolina, told the Union-Tribune.

Conferences and teams collected $228 million in bowl payouts last year, meaning bowl revenues exceeded expenses by $148 million. But that profit would not be possible without the huge payouts from the five Bowl Championship Series bowls. Those five bowls paid out slightly more than $148 million.

That means the 29 non-BCS games are a break-even proposition for the participating teams and conferences.

Bottom line: While the BCS has been a boom to the bowl business, it only pays to play in a BCS game.