The Mountain West Conference in most seasons "makes only a nominal profit" -- less than $1M -- on the bowl games its teams play in that is shared equally among its 12 members, but the games have been "able to remain afloat with the money the conference earns from the College Football Playoff," according to Kelly Lyell of the Ft. Collins COLORADOAN. In most of the bowls the MWC is contracted with, the conference "manages to break even." But had it not been for the CFP, the bowls the conference's schools have played in recent years "might not exist." It "wasn’t all that long ago that schools sometimes lost money while providing their student-athletes that bowl experience." Bowl payouts "didn’t always cover the cost of travel expenses and ticket commitments." But that "all changed in the early 2000s when the conferences started signing contracts with existing bowls and creating new games to assure their postseason-eligible teams would have somewhere to play." Colorado State Senior Exec Associate AD & CFO Steve Cottingham said that business managers and financial officers of the conference schools, in an "effort to help universities better plan for postseason expenses, developed a formula for determining the bowl expense budgets that includes a flat rate that’s the same for all and a per-mile reimbursement based on the distance from each campus to the bowl site." The one game the conference "can count on making money off of each year is the Las Vegas Bowl," which pays about $1.35M to the MWC each year (Ft. Collins COLORADOAN, 12/11).
