Tuesday Reading Room -- A football website's comprehensive look at bowl expenses, and the stonewalling some schools do when it comes to making the figures public

Need some more evidence that bowl games aren't true partners with college football, but instead are  subsidized by it?

Jay Christensen's The Wiz of Odds college football site spent five weeks attaining and analyzing the bowl-expense reports of the schools who participated in bowl games last season. Christensen actually got reports from 56 of the 70 bowl schools, with the other 14 either private schools or ones that cited statues allowing them to keep information off limits to the public.

Among the details that leap of the page  is this:

Totaled, teams spent $22.49 million on absorbed tickets, nearly 25 percent of their overall expenses.

Incredible. $22.49 million on ... nothing.

Without the ticket guarantees, a lot of these bowls would never have created themselves. Without the ticket guarantees, Connecticut would never have lost $1.7 million on its Fiesta Bowl trip. That's because it never would have been invited to the Fiesta Bowl without that guarantee in place.

The Insight Bowl had a record crowd for its Missouri-Iowa matchup last December. But despite what the schools'  expense-report forms may say, the only real financial winner in the game was the bowl itself.

The lengths Christensen (and other media entities) had to go to in order to get information from certain public universities is startling and disturbing, as is how many of the numbers were fudged.

Click here for Christensen's post on the story behind the story. The Wiz will have more aspects from this story as the week progresses.