The Bowl Championship Series is so troubled by the graft exposed in Tuesday’s Fiesta Bowl corruption report that it appointed a special “task force.” Among the members is an athletics director who accepted a free Caribbean cruise from the Orange Bowl just last summer.
Yes, there’s nothing like having a guy – in this case, Southern Mississippi’s Richard Giannini – who takes lavish gifts from one bowl game to judge another bowl game for giving out lavish gifts.
The obvious news from Tuesday’s 276-page Fiesta Bowl report is that longtime CEO John Junker was fired and is in major legal trouble, in part because of the eye-popping way his bowl game was run – $1,200 strip-joint bills tend to generate news interest. The real issue is that the BCS is doing what the Fiesta Bowl originally tried to do: conduct a shallow investigation and hope the party is allowed to rage on.
Tuesday revealed a bowl game involved in illegal political donations, massive kickbacks to college administrators and obscene financial abuse. In just one example, the Fiesta paid Junker’s membership at four separate country clubs in three states.
The BCS wants the problem to be seen as isolated. The task force has been empowered to “evaluate the bowl’s findings and its recommendations,” according to Penn State president Graham Spanier.
There is no mention of doing what common sense would suggest: asking what the heck the other bowls are doing and then examining their finances too. After all, the federal tax filings of some other major bowls show similar non-itemized expenditures, executive salaries and profit margins.
Spanier must belong to the popular Big Ten chapter of the Little Sisters of the Naïve if he thinks that, while milking a multimillion dollar cash cow, the only bowl executives who considered laying the corporate AMEX down at the gentlemen’s club or accepting a $27,000-per-year car allowance or throwing four-day $33,000 birthday parties were Junker and his crew.
The other BCS games? Nope, no need to even ask. Second-tier bowls which pay their executives even more than Junker’s nearly $600,000? Nothing to see here, folks.
