The presentation, promotion and marketing of collegiate athletics, particularly football and men's basketball, have expanded exponentially in the last few years, becoming more than just printing the team schedule in the newspaper and recapping big plays on the video board.

Tim Roberts, president of the National Association of Collegiate Marketing Administrators (NACMA), said that since he got into the business of marketing collegiate sports in the early 1990s, the field has evolved, especially recently.

The old school of thought was that it took winning teams to draw a crowd. The focus of the athletics department, and its budget, was on producing a winning team. After all, winning teams market themselves.

"The problem is you really can't control winning and losing as much as you'd like, so people asked what can we do outside of that to keep our program in a positive light and in the public eye, win, lose or draw?" Roberts said.

The answer was taking a page out of the book that had belonged solely to professional sports. Roberts said he would be hard-pressed to find an athletics department that didn't have at the very least a person who is responsible for marketing, even if they have other jobs. Many schools with larger budgets have a director with an entire staff devoted to promoting the teams and filling the stands.

"Colleges have become more adept at those areas of the business," Roberts said. "In part, it has to do with the way athletics has evolved. It's a bigger business than it used to be. In order to keep up, a lot of athletics departments were forced to do things such as group sales, promotions, marketing your program."

Developing a strategy is a key element in marketing a sports program, and Roberts recommends structuring a "pretty intense plan" to respond to different audiences.

Reaching young children is becoming a focus, he said, because officials are beginning to recognize that members of the growing number of kids' clubs sponsored by athletic departments are the "season ticket buyers of the future."

Athletics departments need to have similar plans for attracting a school's corporate base, season ticket base and donor base, he said.

David Brown, assistant athletics director at Ohio State University and past president of NACMA, breaks down event marketing into three parts: let people know the product exists; give them a reason to come; and once they're there, entertain them.

"A lot of people tend to focus on step three, and if you spend most of your time there, that's wonderful, but for who? You're not getting anybody to come into the games," he said. "Certainly it's always exciting to have a victory at the end, but we can't control that, so we're hoping they have a good time, win or lose. As long as you're asking yourself before each event those three things, you've done your part."

While some marketing professionals express concern that the events surrounding the game could be eclipsing the game itself, Roberts said he doesn't hear that concern and certainly doesn't agree with it. He said college football games especially have become events, something to base get-togethers around, a place to hook up with old friends.

"If you took any sport, professional, college, et cetera, and didn't have some of their entertainment aspects, fewer people would come," he said. "Your die-hard fans would always come, but it's a larger group that's coming for social opportunities and interaction with friends."

Roberts said he thinks the business of marketing collegiate athletics will continue to change, but how it will change depends on individual athletics departments and conferences. Some schools will become more academically minded he said, while other athletics departments that are pressured to become self-sufficient will develop more elaborate strategies.

"I think the envelope will continue to be pushed with regard to marketing," he said.

-- Michelle Brutlag Hosick