College Football National Championship Rings

Last Sunday (the 4th) Seattle collectively exhaled a sigh of relief as the selection committee did the honorable thing and found the Huskies fit to compete in the playoffs. Whether we got cheated out of 3rd is an entirely different discussion, but one thing at a time.  Recent traditions have had the winning team receiving 3 rings; one for the conference championship, the next for the bowl game they win en route, and a third for the national championship. Incidentally the first ring suggests that Ohio State shouldn’t be in the playoffs. Per NCAA guidelines, players can only receive up to $415 of gifts*; ad space starts at $1,000,000 for the championship game. I’m not sure how many ads are sold, but safe to say more than one. That’s a lot of money for the NCAA, not a lot for the actual athletes.

The last few teams that won feature red as a school color. Red typically means rubies, which means it’s going to be expensive to not use enamel (shout out to all my other July birthdays). A “W” with emerald cut amethysts, not so much.  Bezel set that with yellow gold and surround those bad boys with small colorless diamonds and you have the flyest sports championship ring this side of the first Olympics. That’s ballin’ on a budget**.  You could get extra fancy and switch the gold and diamond colors, but let’s keep this fantasy somewhat realistic.

I haven’t itemized it exactly, but I can safely say it’s going to cost a bit more than $415. Nick Saban is getting paid 7.09 million dollars for coaching football, Chris Petersen a paltry 3.6 million. The Patriots spent the most money per ring in 2015 at $36,500, spending a little over 5 million in total; worst case scenario that’s 5 commercials. Assuredly there’s a little wiggle room that we can hook up our student athletes. I sure wouldn’t mind making them :-).

-Matthew Raine

*you get a little extra money for winning additional games but we’re talking a couple hundred here

**as in life, everything is relative

Disclaimer: Most of these numbers have been found using pretty rudimentary Google searches.