The Super Bowl is right around the corner, and the city of Tampa has been overflowing with pre-bowl events and activities leading up to the big game this Sunday.

With the UT campus hosting such events as the recent ESPN College Football Challenge and the upcoming Cato June Superslam Celebrity Basketball Game, UT students have the opportunity to see some of the biggest names in the NFL, celebrity and music industry today.

Gil Swalls, the Associate Athletic Director of Marketing at UT, was very pleased with the amount of offers the school received for renting out space for these pre-bowl events.

‘It’s a financial boom for us,’ Swalls said. ‘Our biggest fundraising each year is renting out our facilities, but we always do it very consciously of the students and school. We’ve turned a lot of things down for logistical reasons.’

This past week the NFL College Football Challenge was held in Pepin Stadium on the soccer field. Airing on Sunday during the Super Bowl, this is one of the many events that have provided the school with nation-wide publicity.

The Bob Martinez Sports Center will also be the assembly area for 2,500 people come Sunday. They are the halftime show participants who will be bussed over to Raymond James Stadium for the Bruce Springsteen halftime show concert during the Super Bowl.

Besides the Cato June Basketball Game, our school was offered another chance at hosting a popular Super bowl event: The Lingerie Bowl.’

‘They offered us the most money, and they would have definitely given us the biggest revenue, but we respectfully turned them down,’ Swalls said. ‘It was just an ethical decision.’
UT has a standard rate for renting out its facilities that runs around $1,000 per day; although

Swalls said UT received much more than that for each of the Super
Bowl events entertained at UT, he declined to comment on the exact amount of money our school is ranking in for being the host to such activities.
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Shelby Kuni can be reached at skuni@ut.edu.

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