'Being a patsy never has paid so well.

College football always has embraced no-contest contests, those glorified scrimmages big-name teams use to pad stats and play backups while the outclassed bunch on the other side tries to retain a little dignity.

The reward for being a reliable pushover always has been a fat check.

With the 12-game schedule now a permanent part of major college football, the weak teams have found themselves in a position of strength at the negotiating table. And Division I-AA teams are getting more opportunities to play up and cash in.

For the big guys, those easy wins have become a lot more costly.

West Virginia athletic director Ed Pastilong said in the past he'd pay "a couple hundred thousand'' to bring a team to Morgantown with no return trip involved.

"Now it's being doubled,'' he said.

And then some.

Check out a few of these scores from the first two weeks of the college football season: Clemson 54, Florida Atlantic 6; Iowa 41, Montana 7; Nebraska 56, Nicholls 7; West Virginia 52, Eastern Washington 3.

But the folks on the wrong side of those lopsided games aren't complaining. Not at these rates.

Eastern Washington got $450,000 from West Virginia. Florida Atlantic made $500,000. Division I-AA Nicholls State received $350,000 to make the trip from Thibodeaux, La., to Lincoln - half of what Louisiana Tech received to play the Cornhuskers a week earlier. Tech fared only a bit better than the Colonels, falling 49-10 in front of 81,000 at Memorial Stadium.

Division I-AA Montana got $650,000 to be the first team to play in Iowa's newly renovated Kinnick Stadium.

"This a fundraising junket for the rest of the athletic department,'' Grizzlies coach Bobby Hauck said before the game. "There's no confusion. The guys know we're going out there to get a paycheck.''

That payday, along with the $450,000 the university received when the Grizzlies played at Oregon in 2005, allowed the athletic department to dig itself out from a $1 million debt two years earlier than expected, athletic director Jim O'Day said.

"I didn't believe in playing for pay,'' said Jacksonville State athletic director Jim Fuller, whose I-AA program will make about $600,000 to play Mississippi State twice and Georgia Tech twice over the next four seasons. "But the reason you do it is to create revenue, and we're all searching for ways to do this.''

The move to a 12-game schedule, which made most coaches cringe, was money driven. For the power conference teams, it meant a chance to play another home game and pocket the millions in revenue created by a packed stadium with long concession lines. At schools such as LSU, Michigan, Ohio State, Florida and Tennessee, fans fill 90,000-plus seats no matter who the home team plays.

What the 12-game slate also created was increased demand for the teams at the bottom of the pile in I-A football to fill up all those new dates for the teams at the top.

West Virginia ended up having to turn to Eastern Washington this spring to fill a date after Buffalo bailed out on the Mountaineers to take a game - and bigger payday - with Auburn. Schedules usually are set years in advance, so Pastilong had to scramble and pay premium rates to get the Eagles to make the cross-country trip from Cheney, Wash.

Pastilong said the $450,000 paid to Eastern Washington is as much as he's prepared to spend on a non-return game - a game where the home team is not contracted to eventually play at the road team's stadium.

Elite and profitable programs such as Nebraska, which clears about $3 million per home game, can afford to pay for two or three non-return games a season - Troy is getting $700,000 to visit Lincoln next week.

"It's been a steady rise from four to five to six to the $700,000 range,'' Nebraska athletic director Steve Pederson said. "One of the issues a lot of us have in (the Big 12) conference is that we're all trying to play the same teams in September.'''