FSU loses money on ACC Championship game - again
Florida State won yet another ACC Championship game in 2013, defeating Duke for the Seminoles' second-straight conference title. But the Seminoles took yet another loss in the pocketbook, losing hundreds of thousands of dollars on the trip.
FSU lost $213,812.22 on the 2013 ACC Championship, according to a public records request by Warchant.com. The income from the game wasn't even enough to cover the ticket expenses, which included approximately 600 seats for the FSU Marching Chiefs and student-athlete tickets. The teams' travel expenses racked up another $194,000.
In an email releasing the records, FSU Associate Athletic Director Rob Wilson said FSU also had to pay for several hundred tickets for player families and support staff.
The loss, while significant, is still much less than what FSU hemorrhaged on the 2012 championship game. The Seminoles lost $478,000 on the 2012 trip to the championship game in the defeat of Georgia Tech. The Yellow Jackets didn't fare much better - the two teams combined to lose more than $850,000 on the title game.
The feeling is that those types of losses are, to some degree, just the cost of doing business. Losing a couple hundred thousand dollars on the ACC Championship game is worth it if it means a couple million in payouts from the BCS.
"That's just the cost of doing business," Associate Athletic Director Monk Bonasorte said. "You look at it when you talk to our business people. Okay, we lost some money on the bowl or ACC title game. But with revenue and licensing and booster contributions, that will go up. It won't be an immediate impact per say."
In an interview before the financial numbers from the championship game were final, Florida State Athletic Director Stan Wilcox stressed the importance of factoring in the BCS revenue. The ACC, buoyed by BCS bowl appearances from FSU and Clemson, stood to bring in just shy of $50 million for the 2013 season, split equally between the member schools.
"Let me put it this way: at the end of the day all the ACC schools are making money because of the fact that we had two teams make it into the BCS," Wilcox told Warchant.com back in February. "So when we revenue share we revenue-share equally across the board. So if you were to just look at the ACC championship itself it wouldn't make sense because of the fact that we kind of include that with the whole bowl football payout for each school."
Nonetheless, the 2013 conference title game saw the ACC adjust the level of tickets given to each participating school, reducing the number from 10,000 to 5,500. Florida State was able to sell out its required allotment, according to the FSU ticket office, and the announced attendance was 67,694, a 3,000-person increase from the announced attendance in the 2012 game. Not only that, but Bonasorte said the number of traveling staff and auxiliary was kept to a minimum.
Those measures still weren't enough to put FSU in the black for the championship game, and now back-to-back trips to the ACC Championship game have cost FSU almost $700,000. According to Bonasorte, that's not going to change.
"They're not going to give us 600 (tickets) for the band, player tickets, our staff and all that," Bonasorte said. "We've got to pay for that. So there is no revenue stream for us besides what the ACC pays us as far as travel allotment."
That allotment, according to FSU's balance sheet, comes to just more than $155,000. FSU's travel expenses slightly exceeded that number, but Bonasorte said the ACC has been adamant that championship teams should bring their bands. Bonasorte said the $200,000 loss is about as close to breaking even as FSU can get under the current circumstances.
If FSU continues to make the ACC Championship game, travel costs will continue to be a concern. After the 2013 season, the ACC announced a six-year agreement to keep its Championship in Charlotte through 2019, meaning the game will be in the same venue for 10 consecutive years.
"At the end of the day, you make money," Bonasorte said. "But when you see a financial statement come out at the end of the year and people are saying all how can you lose money to go to the ACC or National championship? Well that's just the way things are."