Trade one bowl for another
I do not understand the whole Bowl Game thing for football. Every year another bowl pops up. Or maybe the corporate sponser changes and thus the name changes and I just think the bowl is new. Either way, around here the big news is that Tempe doesn’t give a rat’s butt that the Fiesta Bowl when to the Cardinals Stadium. They traded it for the Insight Bowl. Yes, I said the Insight Bowl. It kills me that they don’t have cool names like the Rose Bowl. Even the Fiesta Bowl is nifty. But the Insight Bowl? How unoriginal is that? 
And Darel, enlighten me on how the bowl thing works. Is there a bowl game for every team in football or something?
December 28th, 2006 at 10:49 pm
Let me explain… no, there is too much. Let me sum up.
College football becomes more about the $$ every year (unfortunately.) Meaning, anyone with enough $$ and a stadium can sponsor a bowl game. Often that money comes from sponsors (obviously) and yes, they come and go.. so those are, generally, the same bowls every year.. just a different name. Until recently, the sponsors didn’t actually get top billing. It was the bowl, sponsored by (I remember when the Insight.com Bowl was the Copper Bowl.)
These days, the luxury boxes at stadiums are the real revenue generator - not the “normal” seats….. newer stadiums means more luxury suites which means more revenue, so games like the Fiesta Bowl leave older stadiums for newer ones. There’s a stadium in Miami named the Orange Bowl which hasn’t hosted an Orange Bowl in a long time (it moved across town to the newer Dolphins stadium when it was built.)
Atlanta’s bowl (which I’m going to Saturday night) was the Peach Bowl for a long time, then it was the Chick-fil-A Peach Bowl for awhile, and now it’s just the Chick-fil-A Bowl (officially.) The people of Atlanta refuse to call it that, though - I still refer to it as the Peach Bowl.
Confused yet? =) lol.
You make another astute observation… pretty much every team with a .500 record or better gets to go to a bowl game. It wasn’t that long ago that you had to actually be pretty good to get a bowl bid… but the number of games has probably doubled in the last 10 years… I think 56 of 112 teams get to go to bowls this year.
All in all, though, I like the bowl system.. I’ve been on a bowl trip with Clemson’s team. The players get to have a lot of fun in a part of the country they have probably never been to, and get to do and see different things. And isn’t at least partlywhat an education is all about?
December 29th, 2006 at 12:33 am
Thank you Tri… that was very edumacational.