Bowl games are a really big deal for ESPN and for advertisers who want to sell products during the holiday season. Yes, the college football regular season is hugely important to schools, given the television dollars attached to various conference packages, but the bowls make a lot of money for ESPN and Disney.
The growth of bowls this century has been explosive. There were just 20 bowls in 1996, and that total has roughly doubled since. ESPN owns — not merely televises — nearly half of the current bowl lineup. A number of these games, such as the Bahamas Bowl and the Frisco Bowl, get no more than 15,000 fans in the stands. The optics of a number of these games are terrible… but ESPN doesn’t televise the games for the optics.
ESPN televises these games for the football and the advertising dollars football generates near the holiday season, when people are snowed in and huddled under a blanket with hot cocoa in front of a roaring fire. Show ’em a bowl game, and they’ll watch. This is why ESPN’s 36 postseason games raked in $343.6 million last winter, nearly $10 million per game. ESPN prints money off bowl games. They matter quite a lot, even if they get just 10,000 people in the seats. The ticket sales are largely irrelevant to ESPN’s bottom line.
With this in mind — and with a pandemic likely to still exist in December without a vaccine — why hasn’t the decision already been made to play the smaller bowl games (if we have them this season) on campus sites?
It seems patently foolish to have a California-based team and an Ohio-based team fly to Texas for the Frisco Bowl in a pandemic. In normal circumstances, sure… but not now. What would have been a San Diego State-Ohio game in Texas could be a game played in San Diego this December.
It makes total sense: One plane flight instead of two. One host school can set up accommodations instead of asking a bowl committee or host city (or both) try to deal with two different incoming travel groups while dealing with its own citizens in the midst of a pandemic.
Obviously, the bigger and more prestigious bowls might insist on hosting their games, and that’s reasonable (albeit debatable), but for these smaller games? It should be an easy call.
What if a town such as Mobile, Alabama (Camellia Bowl), has a COVID-19 outbreak just before the bowl game, or what if one of the two teams has a COVID-19 outbreak in late December, which is flu season (or very close to it)? You’re asking for a really big mess. Two teams could potentially get stuck.
On-campus bowls don’t eliminate problems, but they would cut them in half.
This move should have been made yesterday, but as we can see, college football is very much intent on delaying virtually every decision as much as humanly possible.