Orlando, Fla. \u2014 The television broadcast control booth for the Cure Bowl where Arkansas State is about to kick off against Central Florida.<\/p>\n
The game producer calls for camera one to position a wide shot of the east side of the stadium to open the bowl telecast.<\/p>\n
The game director says, \u201care you sure you want that opening shot? The east side is nearly empty of fans.\u201d<\/p>\n
_ \u00a0 _\u00a0 _\u00a0 _\u00a0 _\u00a0 _\u00a0 _\u00a0 _ \u00a0 _ \u00a0 _<\/p>\n
Detroit, Mich. \u2014 Pretty much the same television control room for the Quick Lane Bowl between Boston College and Maryland. Game producer says, \u201csomeone; anyone on a camera \u2014 give me the opening stadium shot with the most people in it \u2026 please. We\u2019re live in 5 seconds and I don\u2019t see enough fans.\u201d<\/p>\n
_ \u00a0 _\u00a0 _\u00a0 _\u00a0 _\u00a0 _\u00a0 _\u00a0 _ \u00a0 _ \u00a0 _<\/p>\n
Albuquerque, N.M. \u2014 Directors and producers in the TV broadcast trailer at the site of something called the New Mexico Bowl are scrambling as New Mexico and U.T.-San Antonio are minutes from kick-off. \u201cWe don\u2019t have a wide or medium shot of enough fans in the stands. Can the Goodyear blimp help us from up top? To hell with it \u2014 let\u2019s open with the talent in the booth. But turn them around away from the empty stadium, will you?\u201d<\/p>\n
_ \u00a0 _\u00a0 _\u00a0 _\u00a0 _\u00a0 _\u00a0 _\u00a0 _ \u00a0 _ \u00a0 _<\/p>\n
Those were actual transcripts from ESPN or some Fox regional nameless network\u2019s control rooms acquired by the Freedom of Information Act, Homeland Security and maybe CTU as well.<\/p>\n
The cable networks, the NCAA and their brethren from the Bowl games really don\u2019t want you to know or see that the majority of these 40-odd college bowl games that started in early December and just ended are barely attracting flies, much less passable crowds.<\/p>\n
It wasn\u2019t that long ago that the Holiday and Sun Bowls drew snickers and chuckles from any red-blooded, respectable college football fan.<\/p>\n
Now those two have moved up the bowl food chain and are considered middle tier and a pretty decent post-season date.<\/p>\n
Has anyone outside of Toledo, Ohio; Troy, Al.; or Tulsa, Ok. ever heard of any of the following bowl games: Celebration Bowl, Camellia Bowl, Cure Bowl, Military Bowl, Cactus Bowl, Pinstripe Bowl, Belk Bowl, TaxSlayer Bowl or the Foster Farms Bowl?<\/p>\n
At least you know where the Las Vegas Bowl, New Orleans Bowl, Heart of Dallas Bowl, Texas Bowl, Arizona Bowl, Bahamas Bowl and Hawaii Bowl are played. That\u2019s a start.<\/p>\n
I can only guess that in recent years, a large collection of bowls were hatched in corporate board rooms as the brain child of some marketing whiz.<\/p>\n
There\u2019s the Dollar General Bowl in Mobile, Ala. Does Dollar General really need to tell people they exist? They have a store on every corner in every small American town.<\/p>\n
The Russell Athletic Bowl had to do something against the likes of Nike and Under Armor.<\/p>\n
The Famous Idaho Potato Bowl is catchy \u2014 but why? We already like Idaho potatoes.<\/p>\n
At first, I thought the Belt Bowl might have been from AutoZone, but I was mistaken. (How could I have missed it?) It\u2019s actually the Belk Bowl brought to you by a department store chain.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s safe to say the state of Florida has the bowl market cornered, with the Miami Beach, Boca Raton and St. Petersburg Bowls. Those are in addition to the more established and accepted Orange, Citrus, Gator (TaxSlayer), and Outback (Tampa) Bowls. Most college teams will take a Florida trip before giving any serious consideration to the Independence Bowl in Shreveport.<\/p>\n
The bowls have been in business for decades. They\u2019re run by many large, well-heeled, well-organized and well-financed committees, whose members work at their events year-round.<\/p>\n
The Big Bowls \u2014 like the Rose, Orange, Sugar, Fiesta, Cotton and, to a lesser extent, the Peach, Citrus and Outback \u2014 pay out upwards of $15-20 million per team. Point of reference: the national championship game on Jan. 9 will award Alabama and Clemson in the range of $22-24 million each, while the New Orleans bowl wrote a $500,000 check to both U.L.-Lafayette and Southern Miss.<\/p>\n
Much, if not all, of that comes from broadcast rights fees paid by television networks and corporate sponsors like Northwestern Mutual (Rose Bowl) and All State (Sugar) tied to the respective games.<\/p>\n
ESPN ponied up the bulk of the bucks when it agreed to a $5.64-billion, 12-year broadcast contract for the rights to the College Football Playoffs from 2014 through 2025.<\/p>\n
Billions are paid to fill programming hours. There\u2019s advertising time to sell. And there are TV ratings (eyeballs on big screens) to promote the networks and other shows.<\/p>\n
The all-important television ratings have been up slightly the last two years. During the first college play-off format in 2015, ESPN saw its average rating increase slightly from 3.2 percent of total TV households under the old BCS to 3.4 percent.<\/p>\n
The trends show the ratings will stay in that range this year, despite Alabama and Clemson\u2019s route of Washington and Ohio State respectively.<\/p>\n
In many of the aforementioned itty bitty bowls, the TV ratings have dropped and the cable and broadcast networks have had to run \u201cmake good\u201d ads in other programming for sponsors due to lower than expected ratings. That\u2019s according to recent articles in Forbes.<\/p>\n
All those empty stadium seats you see in the background of the TV coverage mean fewer and fewer fans are buying tickets. There were reports this bowl seson that tickets to some games were going for less than $20 each.<\/p>\n
Even the Citrus Bowl in sunny Orlando, with LSU on the marquee, was not immune to below-average attendance. LSU could only sell 5,000 of its allotted 8,000 tickets. The lower sections of the stadium were relatively packed, but the upper half was completely empty.<\/p>\n
That\u2019s an unusual sight for the Tigers, who are accustomed to playing in front of sold-out crowds. With the Citrus Bowl being the highest-paying bowl outside of the Big Four and play-offs,\u00a0 LSU and Louisville each added $4.25 million to their school\u2019s coffers.<\/p>\n
In 2015, ESPN reported the 38 bowl games averaged a tad over 43,000, which was a 9-percent attendance drop from the prior year. Media reports have indicated bowl attendance will dip again this year by nearly 10 percent when all the numbers come in.<\/p>\n
Forbes cited some recent attendance woes at The Camping World Independence Bowl in Shreveport, which drew fewer than 29,000 fans for N.C. State and Vanderbilt \u2014 the lowest gate for the game since 1988.<\/p>\n
Mississippi State and Miami of Ohio attracted a measly 15,000 fans in St. Petersburg, Fla. And the announced crowd of 32,377 at the Dollar General Bowl in Mobile was believed to be well above that in the stadium. That\u2019s with home state Troy playing just a few hours from its campus north of Mobile.<\/p>\n
An NCAA report from April, 2015,\u00a0 stated that the 39 post-season FBS bowl games distributed nearly $506 million to the various conferences and schools that took the field. Those college programs shelled out over $100 million in bowl game expenses. That\u2019s an overall net profit for the participating schools of over $405 million dollars.<\/p>\n
That\u2019s a pretty sweet deal, and the reason member NCAA schools want to see even more bowl games and why rules are stretched, allowing sub-.500 teams to be bowl-eligible. A total of 80 teams were bowl-bound in 2016, spread across 40 events. Bowl geeks, get ready, because there\u2019s chatter that the total number of games could go to 43 in 2017.<\/p>\n
Bring on more Poinsetta and Camellia Bowls and heart-stopping match-ups between Wake Forest and Temple!<\/p>\n
Do these hard-working, unpaid student athletes deserve a season-ending fun trip to anywhere USA to eat endless chicken wings and go home with a swag bag of warm-ups, a ball cap and a commemorative cup? You bet. No question.<\/p>\n
But I\u2019m part of a growing trend of sports fans who aren\u2019t all that interested in a fifth straight U.L.-Lafayette versus Northwest State Tech A&M University in the meaningless New Orleans Bowl.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s a simple case of supply and demand. There are too many cartoon-named bowls crammed over an endless four weeks of December amid a dwindling desire by fans to break into the Christmas Club account to buy game tickets.<\/p>\n
I\u2019m a diehard fan of the big bowls that come with parades, a worthy trophy and headline-making match-ups.<\/p>\n
I want the NCAA to expand the college playoffs to eight teams, four games and rotate the games between the various New Year\u2019s weekend bowls.<\/p>\n
I want the college bowl overload to end before we all cut our TV cable cords and become NetFlix nerds and Hulu-ers.<\/p>\n
I want someone this side of Green Acres to tell me what the heck Foster Farms grows and why they need a bowl game.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Orlando, Fla. \u2014 The television broadcast control booth for the Cure Bowl where Arkansas State is about to kick off against Central Florida. The game producer calls for camera one to position a wide shot of the east side of the stadium to open the bowl telecast. The game director says, \u201care you sure you [&hellip<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":278,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[64,33],"yoast_head":"\n