Indiana University sold less than 10 percent of its ticket allotment for the 2016 Foster Farms Bowl, but the Big Ten Conference covered the vast majority of the cost.
Each school participating in the Foster Farms Bowl was given an allotment of 7,000 tickets. An expense report submitted to the NCAA showed 6,328 of IU’s allotment went unsold. The university only paid for 970 of those unsold tickets at a cost of $91,620. The Big Ten paid $407,557 for the remaining unsold tickets, but the conference technically paid for the entire cost of the trip.
The official payout for 2016 Foster Farms Bowl participants IU and the University of Utah was $2,212,500 each. However, IU doesn’t get that money directly.
Payouts for Big Ten institutions participating in bowl games go to the conference. Each official payout is only a portion of what the conference receives, and the Big Ten does not publicly disclose financial details of bowl game participation.
It cost IU more than $2.5 million to participate in the 2016 Foster Farms Bowl. That’s about $350,000 more than IU’s official payout. But when the Big Ten’s contribution for unsold tickets is factored in, IU actually received a payout of more than $2.6 million.
This is the second year in a row the conference has helped IU cover the cost of unsold bowl game tickets. More than 4,000 of the 7,500 tickets allotted to IU for the 2015 New Era Pinstripe Bowl went unsold. IU only absorbed 950 of those unsold tickets, at a cost of about $84,000. The conference paid about $345,000 to cover the cost of 3,369 unsold tickets.