Bowl Suggestion ..

[aTotal360]

Exactly. It's just short sighted people that want to sound tough.

 

[johnson86-1]

45,671 last year between Georgia and Louisville. 60.9% full -- or the 10th scarcest stadium in bowl season... We will see how full it is tomorrow.

Is 45,671 the 10th smallest crowd in bowl season? Or is 60.9% full the 10th worse percentage (which I would think is basically irrelevant). I would have thought good teams had gotten apathetic enough about mid tier and lower tier bowl games that 45k would be a decent crowd at this point. I'm assuming even though we won't do that well that NC St. will bring a crowd and we'll be 45k.

I guess the real question is how many people pay full price for their tickets and how many are unloaded on the secondary market. If 45k spend an average of $40 per ticket, that's $1.8M. Cutting that number in half I would assume would be pretty important to the economics of the bowl. If most of the 45k in attendance got the tickets on the secondary market for cheap after the school and sponsors ate their face value, then maybe it's not really important.

ETA: 45k was about 17th overall, so basically dead middle in attendance among all the bowls and a couple of thousand more than the average.

 

[RocketDawg]

The ACC also travels week in and week out during the regular season because ACC schools are so spread out. They go from south Florida to New England, and now into the midwest and upper South (Louisville). And now the SEC does it to an extent with the addition of Missouri and Texas A&M.

One problem with having an SEC/Pac 10 game on the west coast, and then in the east the next year, is that the same two teams most likely wouldn't be playing each other. So it wouldn't be a reciprocal thing from the fans' standpoint, only the conferences.

 

[RocketDawg]

ESPN makes these games possible with TV money, but if anything drives crappy bowls it's every medium size city wanting a bowl game for the tourism dollars and prestige. Shreveport has a bowl because their local people are always out hustling for a sponsor. For the most part, it's not corporations that go around begging to give money to crappy bowls. How many people have you heard lament the fact that we don't have a bowl in Mississippi. If it ever happens, it will be local business people and tourism boards organizing it. ESPN or another network will be required to make it financially viable, but if ESPN was driving the process, every crappy bowl game would be in major or midmajor city or at least a good warm weather tourism destination. I'm actually not sure why there aren't more locations hosting multiple bowls. I think Charlotte is a good location for a bowl, but it seems to me that now that the Peach Bowl isn't an SEC bowl, it would make a lot more sense attendance wise to have a lower tier bowl in Atlanta than in Charlotte. TV revenue would be the same, attendance would be a lot easier for most SEC teams, and the only downside would be the sense that the bowl was second fiddle in its own city, but that doesn't seem like that big of a deal to me. Also seems like we should have a mid tier bowl in New Orleans.

Does the New Orleans Bowl still exist? That was at best mid-tier wasn't it?

 

[BiscuitEater]

The sponsors seem to change every year on a lot of the bowls though. So it may not be all that lucrative for them.

You mean it's not STILL the Poulan Weed Eater Bowl?

 

[johnson86-1]

Does the New Orleans Bowl still exist? That was at best mid-tier wasn't it?

It still exists as far as I know but mid-tier would be generous. Think it's a sunbelt bowl now, was a Conference USA bowl at one time; not sure who the other tie-in is but Nevada played last year.

If I were New Orleans, I'd much rather have a bowl in new orleans with lower tier ties to major conference than have Sun Belt and whatever else they have. Last year, ULL and Nevada brought 33k to the New Orleans Bowl. The Liberty bowl had 51k between A&M and West Virginia. I think most SEC fans would rather travel to New Orleans than Memphis, Birmingham, Charlotte, Nashville and really even Jacksonville. THe only problem I guess is that bowls lean on the local community so much for the weekly festivities, and i could see how the support in Memphis, Nashville, and Charlotte for their one bowl would be better than a second bowl in New Orleans or Atlanta.