No Holiday for Bowl Game’s Committee
Imagine you’re inviting 60,000 friends to a party. The event is only three weeks away and about half the guest list has yet to be filled out.
Up until Dec. 8, that was the problem confronting the organizers of the Pacific Life Holiday Bowl, San Diego’s annual college football game that normally fills Qualcomm Stadium with 60,000-plus fans , many of whom come from out of state to support their school. Many of those fans fill local hotels, pumping some $20 million into the local economy.
In past years, Holiday Bowl organizers have known by Thanksgiving , and even earlier , who the participants would be. This year, however, invitations to Arizona State of the Pac-10 Conference and Kansas State of the Big 12 Conference couldn’t be sent until several other bowl games had settled on their participants.
While certain circumstances dictated the late invitations , final standings weren’t determined until Dec. 7 , it does not appear this is an aberration. Rather than being a blip in an otherwise normal procedure, the current structure of deciding who plays in which college football bowl games could leave Holiday Bowl organizers as well as those of other pre-Jan. 1 bowl games scrambling at the last minute to fill their dance cards for years to come.
Call it the trickle-down theory. The major bowls , the Rose, Orange, Sugar and Fiesta , must wait until early December to select from the elite teams in the bowl championship series, leaving many other organizing committees scrambling to fill not only their dance card, but their stadiums as well.
The Holiday Bowl is relatively lucky even under such difficult circumstances. San Diego is guaranteed two upper-echelon teams from two outstanding conferences. And the final result, more often than not, has been a shootout that lasts until the final seconds.
The game has developed a well-deserved reputation over its 25-year history for exciting finishes that annually draws huge television ratings. The game’s purse , $2 million is paid to each school and their conferences ,is eighth out of the 25 bowl games.
But second-tier bowl games could be facing a crisis. As the bowl championship series holds hostage these games, schools, fans, host cities and the organizing committees will face an annual struggle of how to sell out an event with only two or three weeks to plan it. If attendance lags and the communities lose interest, some may simply decide the stress and effort isn’t worth it.
While that’s unlikely to happen in San Diego, the BCS trickle-down philosophy nonetheless causes some major headaches for Holiday Bowl organizers. And in college football, only the teams should be struggling to see who survives, not the bowl games themselves.
, Rick Bell