Collage Sports

In Japan, we don’t have any popular collage sports event like the NCAA basketball tournament in the United States. We have a popular high school baseball tournament because baseball was almost the only sports to watch long tome ago. These days, Japanese people watch and play more different sports, such as soccer and basketball, but there are no professional or amateur sporting event, which has nation-wide popularity besides international match of the Japanese soccer team. So, I became to dream to develop collage sports events as a business in Japan like the NCAA basketball tournament in order to enhance more people to get interested in sports, develop more young talented players, and encourage local economy.  Therefore, I was looking for the pros and cons about the NCAA basketball tournament and found some interesting articles.

According to the Pop History Gig, the organizers of the 2009 “final four” championship NCAA basketball games estimated the event could generate somewhere between $30 million dollars and $40 million dollar to the host city, Detroit. In fact this event brought a lot of NCAA fans to Detroit with 72,000 people in the first 2 days. So, nation-wide popular sports event can encourage the local business by visitors from other places.

The NCAA basketball tournament is in the second position in terms of ad sales for sporting event in the US. CBS got $613.8 million in ad sales from the tournament in 2010. Only the NFL playoff could make more ad sales revenue than the NCAA basketball tournament with $793.8 million dollars, but the NBA and the MLB were more than $200 million below. The cost for 30 seconds commercial during the last 2 rounds of the NCAA basketball tournament was $1.2 million; on the other hand it was $400,000 for the World Series. Smart Money explained this difference comes from the system of the games between the NCAA basketball tournament and the World Series. Since the World Series is head-to-head style, the number of audiences and ticket sales depend on the size of fan base. However, the NCAA basket tournament are gathering teams from all over the nation, so this event has always national appeal. Also, I think there is another reason that the NCAA tournament is more popular than the World Series. It is that in the NCAA tournament, each game is concluded in one game instead MLB plays more than 4 games to come to a conclusion. So, each game of the NCAA tournament is more exciting.

John Calipari earns $4 million a year

On the other side, there are several negative sides of the NCAA basketball tournament. First of all, only little school’s sports programs in the black. Most of sports programs are loosing money because the cost of maintaining a team in a good shape costs a lot. Also, the salary of a head coach is the issue for maintaining a team. Some coaches get more than 5% of the team’s annual revenue even though the head coach of Los Angels Lakers, Phil Jackson gets only less than 2% of the team’s revenue. As the article from Forbes said, head coaches are representing teams, but they get too much portion of the revenue with less working hours than head coaches of the NBA teams.

The NCAA basketball tournament generates big money. However, because of the popularity, the cost of running a team is increasing every season. If I want to bring the business model of the NCAA basketball tournament to Japan, I have to modify the negative part of it. A lot of collages in Japan have economic difficulties. So, it is better to create a good distributing system of the revenue like the NFL does. I will keep researching about the NCAA basketball tournament as well as the trends of the Japanese sports industry to come up with good ways to develop collage sports in Japan.