There are many things in this world I do not understand, and this column certainly does not provide the necessary space to address them all. I can’t even cover all the things in sports that I don’t understand here. Today, I will limit it to just a singular topic; the “There are too many bowl games” crowd. I do not understand you. You choose a hill to die on that makes very little sense to me. I will assure you of very little but I can assure you I’ll never complain about too much football being on my television, and neither will ESPN.
The bowl game structure has changed dramatically over the last 20-30 years. Nobody can argue that.
As a child, I vividly remember the 1984 Iron Bowl. Auburn entered the game 8-3 and ranked 11th in the nation. Because only one loss was inside the SEC, they would be SEC Champions with a win over Alabama that day. That win carried a Sugar Bowl bid for the Tigers, the destination of each SEC Champion at the time. Alabama sprung the upset that Saturday and Auburn fell to the…Liberty Bowl. Can you imagine an SEC team today losing a single game that dropped them from a New Year’s Six Bowl to the Liberty Bowl? It was a different world then.
Today, conferences tie themselves in with bowls to avoid that from happening. There is very little intrigue anymore when it comes to bowl selections. The same conferences play one another in the same bowls each year and it feels like we get the same matchups far too often. That has not stopped ESPN from giving them to us in record numbers.
Aside from the Sun Bowl, Barstool Bowl, and Holiday Bowl, ESPN and ABC fill our stockings with one bowl game after the other. No start time is sacred, they will show them over breakfast, over a fourth meal, and all times in between.
The reason for this is very simple: you watch and bowl games sell. In fact, the 2022 bowl game season only delivered two games that had fewer than a million viewers. The Bahamas Bowl (822,000 viewers) and the Myrtle Beach Bowl (921,000 viewers) were the only two games that did not top the one million viewer mark. Not all was lost, though, all four teams in those two games played in front of more viewers in their bowl game than they had in any other game that season.
Those teams are not alone. Numbers vary annually but, at least, 70% of the 2022 bowl teams played in front of their largest TV audience of the season during their bowl game. That set of teams is not limited to the East Carolinas and Temples of the world. The College Football Playoffs teams — Michigan, TCU, Georgia, and Ohio State — all played in front of a significantly larger TV audience than any game they had played all year. Simply put: Bowl games are stand-alone games at a time when many people are hungry for entertainment and they watch in large numbers.
It is good business for ESPN, who is not afraid to interrupt their daily debate show lineup to show you Troy playing UTSA in the Cure Bowl. That Friday afternoon kick last December 16th drew 1.46 Million viewers on ESPN. In that window, not one cable show had more viewers than that game. That’s about the most random bowl and matchup you can find and, still, it delivered a ratings win.
Bowls are good business for ESPN, so much so, that they actually own several. Need to fill a weekday December TV window? Just play a random bowl game and more than a million people are happy to watch. But you don’t have to watch, nobody is making you. That’s why I don’t understand the “Too Many Bowls” crowd. If you think there should only be 15 bowls like when you were a kid, pick 15 and watch those.
Bowls are going nowhere, ESPN shows them and we are, mostly, happy to watch them. The bowls will never be what they once were, I don’t argue they felt more important when I was a kid. But ESPN is going to show us as many as they can squeeze in.
They know one important fact: our country is addicted to football, if they show it, we’ll watch it.
Ryan Brown is a columnist for Barrett Sports Media, and a co-host of the popular sports audio/video show ‘The Next Round’ formerly known as JOX Roundtable, which previously aired on WJOX in Birmingham. You can find him on Twitter @RyanBrownLive and follow his show @NextRoundLive.
