Corporate gifts to college football players

From an article in today's Wisconsin State Journal about a "shopping spree" for the University of Wisconsin football players participating in the Rose Bowl -

If you haven't heard, players and coaches were recently ushered into a suite stocked with 27 tony gifts and allowed to select up to $500 worth of leather recliners, digital cameras, headphones, camcorders, mountain bikes and the like — all on Rose Bowl sponsors' dime...

... it came as a surprise to me to learn that this is standard practice in NCAA Division I college football, whose 69 other bowl-bound teams are getting a similar perk.

UW assistant athletic director of external relations Justin Doherty said the NCAA allows football players that go to a bowl to get up to $350 each in institution-funded and up to $500 each in bowl-funded "participation awards," or "bowl gifts."

"By doing that it creates some equity and a rules structure around which this participating award process can happen," he said, and that's different from allowing a school or its boosters to buy things for their athletes willy-nilly, because not all schools nor their boosters have pockets of equal depth.