NCAA Tournament does big things for small programs

When Bryan Moon shook Drake University athletic director Sandy Hatfield Clubb's hand recently at a luncheon, there was something extra in it.

This time, Moon included a $1,000 check for the Des Moines school's Bulldog Scholarship Fund.

"This was a donation above and beyond what he already made this year," Hatfield Clubb said.

Later that week, Moon, who became a Drake basketball fan sitting on his father's lap at games as a child, made a five-year financial commitment to the athletic department.

When Drake takes the court Friday in Tampa, Fla., for its NCAA Tournament game against Western Kentucky, the team, the university and its energized fan base enter a much different world than their last visit 37 years ago.

In 1971, the NCAA received a paltry $547,500 for telecast of the championship game, compared to the $545 million CBS Sports will spend this year for the tournament.

The impact on a school has become much more dramatic over the years, too, as mid-major programs such as Gonzaga, Butler and George Mason experienced higher enrollments, larger foundation coffers, bigger athletic department budgets and increased name recognition.

There's now big potential for smaller programs like Drake to steal the spotlight on the sport's biggest stage.

"Some of the benefits may be intangible," said Barry Collier, athletic director at Butler, "but some of them are immense. The publicity Butler has received in the last two years amounts to a 40-hour national television infomercial."

"There once was a time when we didn't care how anyone pronounced Gonzaga, we were just glad they mentioned us," Dale Goodwin, director of public relations for Gonzaga University in Spokane, Wash. "Now, most people know how to pronounce it."

That's just one thing that happens when a small, private university makes nine straight appearances in the NCAA Tournament, including an Elite Eight finish in 1999.

Officials at Gonzaga - pronounced gahn-ZAYG-uh - have built a new, 6,000-seat arena as the program earns on average more than $1 million a year on men's basketball, compared to barely breaking even a decade ago. Freshman applications average about 4,000 per year, compared to 2,000 in 1999, and annual inquiries about the university have jumped from 20,000 a year to 50,000.

Annual fundraising has grown from $9 million to $15 million.

Butler has played in the NCAA Tournament three times in the last seven years - including Sweet 16 finishes in 2003 and 2007.

Basketball success helped boost enrollment numbers, as well as the number of season-ticket holders who contribute annually. Only 25 percent of season-ticket holders were annual donors in 2006-07, but that has grown to 40 percent.