I've written before on cupcakes in college football (see here as well). You know the cupcake. The team expected to lay down in front of your superior squad in exchange for a sexy payout. The team that allows you to tailgate without much gnashing of teeth. The team that allows you to bring your kids to a game and allow let them be free range kids without all the worry. You won't miss a thing while you're spending time parenting.
Why is it good to be the cupcake? Because they get paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to come to your place for a shellacking. Moreover, according to press reports, because of the added 12th game in D-1 football (or FBS, or whatever you want to call that rose), the demand for cupcakes has risen, giveing rise to bigger payouts to the cupcakes.
Because those payouts are lucrative, at least one team decided to take a guaranteed loss - a 100% percent guarantee, mind you - in exchange for a nice payout. And that was a loss on top of the highly-probable, almost-certain loss it was going to be given at the hands of the Michigan Wolverines.
HT Stephen Karlson who chirps:You see, the Michigan Wolverines dangled $550,000 in front of the Hornets to play this Saturday. The only catch: Delaware State already had a conference game set against North Carolina A&T for that date.
So what did the Hornets do? Well what every Football Championship Series team would do: forfeit the conference game, take the money and, oh yeah, lose to Michigan 63-6.
Sounds like a win-win to me, right?
It's amateur sports. It's all for the experience. Heck, Delaware State played Michigan just for practice. But don't say it has anything to do with money.
Of course not. The schools are non-profits, although when you sit down and look at the things they do (setting ticket prices and negotiating coaches' salaries, for example), they behave an awful lot like the pros. It has something to do with the invariance hypothesis.
Cross-posted at The Sports Economist