Inside Bowl Season's big bonkers budgets

Hello, and welcome to your weekly FOIAball. 

Bowl season is upon us and, once again, it is beset by breathless concerns that its demise is nigh. 

Sure, maybe. You won’t get much analysis here on that front. Good or bad, it’s always been an absurd and ultimately meaningless spectacle. 

What we can tell you is that schools go to great lengths to maintain the patina of pageantry around the games, aided by some truly egregious expenses. 

Which were obtained by FOIAball! We got $30 million in spending across 18 bowls last season. There’s a lot we want to show you.

We’d like to begin with an image. Despite hours of searching online, it’s unfortunately the best shot we could find.

We’re gonna guess you can’t tell what that is. That’s okay. It’s just $200 out of a $1.7 million line-item budget for a school. 

But it goes to show how college football blows through gobs of cash to justify its own importance. 

Want to know what it is? Read on.