Chick-fil-A Vies With Beef `O' Brady's Bowl During College Football Frenzy
The Outback Bowl
Scott Halleran/Getty Images
The Outback Bowl, formerly known as the Hall of Fame Bowl.
The Outback Bowl, formerly known as the Hall of Fame Bowl. Photographer: Scott Halleran/Getty Images
The Chick-fil-A Bowl
Kevin C. Cox/Getty Images
In 2006, Chick-fil-A became the first sponsor to take over the entire name of a bowl game.
In 2006, Chick-fil-A became the first sponsor to take over the entire name of a bowl game. Photographer: Kevin C. Cox/Getty Images
In the world of college football bowl games, it’s not the year that matters, it’s the naming rights.
The Peach Bowl is now the Chick-fil-A Bowl, the Citrus Bowl is the Capital One Bowl and the Motor City Bowl is the Little Caesars Pizza Bowl.
Other teams will be competing at the Outback Bowl, the Insight Bowl, the MAACO Bowl Las Vegas, the Meineke Car Care Bowl, the Kraft Fight Hunger Bowl, the Military Bowl and the Beef ‘O’ Brady’s Bowl, Bloomberg Businessweek reports in its Dec. 13 issue.
Unlike other major sports’ governing bodies, college football’s -- National Collegiate Athletic Association -- doesn’t run its own postseason. Instead, it allows private companies to start their own bowl games, invite teams to play and then -- if they choose -- bring on sponsors. It’s such a free-market system that Dan Wetzel, co-author of the new book “Death to the BCS” -- meaning the Bowl Championship Series -- said, “I could start a bowl.” The BCS oversees five games -- the Rose, Orange, Fiesta and Sugar bowls as well as the BCS championship game.
Twenty-six percent of fans like the current bowl system, according to a Quinnipiac University poll. Barack Obama and John McCain campaigned against it, and it pulls in a lot less money than would a playoff system such as that used in college basketball.
Outsource Product
“It’s the only business that outsources its most profitable product,” Wetzel said. “Other than to see their own team, nobody says, ‘I have to go to the Humanitarian Bowl!’”
While no other business would spend decades investing in a program only to hand it over to a third party, dozens of schools do every year even with a limited payoff. Says Wetzel: “There’s nothing like holding up a trophy from the galleryfurniture.com Bowl.”
With 70 teams playing in bowl games this year, lots of stadiums will be pretty empty. While bowls can profit from requiring schools to buy blocks of full-price tickets to sell to fans, few institutions can unload their bounty -- particularly when they’re playing in a bowl in Boise, Idaho, site of the uDrove Humanitarian Bowl on Dec. 18.
$1.77 Million Loss
Even at the 2009 FedEx Orange Bowl (now the Discovery Orange Bowl), Virginia Tech sold 20 percent of the 17,500 tickets it bought for $120 apiece. It lost $1.77 million.
Still, virtually all colleges play along, often so they can tell recruits and donors they went to a bowl game -- even the Beef ‘O’ Brady’s Bowl, set for Dec. 21 in St. Petersburg, Florida. And many coaches and athletic directors get bonuses for getting their teams into a bowl.
“These bowls are a scam,” said Brian Frederick, executive director of the Sports Fans Coalition, a lobbyist group. “They make money by selling names to sponsors. That’s why you get these awful names. The uDrove Humanitarian Bowl? What the hell is that?”
Frederick is one of several lobbyists in an industry you might think would need none. Ari Fleischer, former press secretary to President George W. Bush, works for the BCS. Playoff PAC, a political committee focused on the college football postseason, lobbies against it. Representative Joe Barton, a Texas Republican, held antitrust hearings against the BCS last year, and Senators Orrin Hatch, a Utah Republican, and Max Baucus, a Montana Democrat, are trying to end the BCS system. (Their home states have universities in conferences without automatic bids to BCS games.)
ESPN Support
The biggest company backing the system is ESPN, which airs 35 bowl games and owns seven of them, including the Bell Helicopter Armed Forces Bowl, the BBVA Compass Bowl and the Beef ‘O’ Brady’s Bowl.
“Our No. 1 goal is to find a multiyear relationship with a sponsor,” said Pete Derzis, senior vice president and general manager of ESPN Regional Television. “We don’t want to be in the rebranding business every other year.”
ESPN says it has never had a sponsorship name rejected by the NCAA.
“We have our own filter,” said Tom Hagel, senior director at ESPN. “When you’re in the bowl business, it’s almost like you’re buying a house in a neighborhood. You don’t want a real bad house in the neighborhood.”
It is, however, a neighborhood big enough to have included the CarQuest Bowl, the California Raisin Bowl and, starting this year, the GoDaddy.com Bowl -- which used to be the GMAC Bowl until the U.S. government decided the name wasn’t worth taxpayers’ money. Known for its racy commercials, the Internet domain registry company’s proposed sponsorship “received some discussion,” said Nick Carparelli, chairman of the NCAA football issues committee. “But in the end the NCAA is not in the censorship business. Bowl games are independent businesses.”
Business Is Good
For many sponsors, business is good. When AB Electrolux Home Products pulled out of the Independence Bowl in Shreveport, Louisiana, locally based Poulan WeedEater sponsored the game from 1990 until 1996, when the bowl moved to North Carolina. “Overall, it was a net benefit,” said Evin Ellis, the company’s marketing communications manager. “We consider WeedEater the Kleenex of weed whacking.”
Perhaps, but the sponsorship did have a lasting effect: “Weedwhacker Bowl” now refers to a college bowl that no one really cares about. And while such a fate could befall the GoDaddy.com Bowl, the company’s chief executive officer, Bob Parsons, believes the sponsorship will drive traffic to its website. “We don’t do anything that doesn’t make money,” Parsons said.
Long Tradition
The GoDaddy.com Bowl might not have the luster of the Masters Tournament, but the 1902-founded Rose Bowl in Pasadena, California, the 1935 Sugar Bowl in New Orleans and the 1935 Orange Bowl in Miami were working pretty hard for their local industries, too.
“If you trace bowl games back to their beginning, the whole idea was to stimulate tourism by bringing together two college teams in different communities,” said the NCAA’s Carparelli. So the San Diego County Credit Union Poinsettia Bowl is part of a century-old sports tradition. And like many traditions, over time it has gotten a lot bigger, and a lot tackier.
To contact the reporter on this story: Jonathan Kelly at jkelly101@bloomberg.net
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Jonathan Kelly at jkelly101@bloomberg.net
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