Navy Sports

GreatAmerican
Sun, 27 Apr 2008 15:44:47 +0000

By
Stewart Mandel
CNNSI

If you happen to be among those who have yet to embrace the existence of the PapaJohns.com Bowl and the International Bowl, or if it makes your skin crawl to see 6-6 teams square off against each other in the postseason, you’re probably not going to like what I’m about to tell you.

The 2008-09 bowl lineup could be even bigger.

Next week in Weston, Fla., organizers for three potential new bowl games will make their presentations to the NCAA’s Bowl Certification Committee. They are: The Congressional Bowl in Washington, D.C, (Navy vs. ACC); The St. Petersburg Bowl in St. Petersburg, Fla. (Big East vs. Conference USA); and the Rocky Mountain Bowl in Salt Lake City (Mountain West vs. WAC).

No, this is not a joke.

If all existing bowls earn recertification, as is expected, and if all three new contests get approved, it would raise the total number of bowl games to 35 – up from 22 less than a decade ago.

At this point, you may be asking yourself: “Aren’t they going to run out of teams?” Many in the bowl business are wondering the same thing.

“There’s a lot of concern in our association about adding even one more game,” said Scott Ramsey, executive director of the Music City Bowl and chairman of the Football Bowl Association. “One of the worst things that could happen down the road is for the organizers of a game to spend all year preparing for it and then not have enough teams to play. It would give the bowl system a collective black eye.”

Just how low on the totem pole are these games willing to go? The Congressional Bowl’s agreement with the ACC would send the league’s ninth eligible team to D.C – but the conference has yet to produce more than eight since expanding in 2004. (The bowl’s backup partner is the MAC.) And a potential partnership with the St. Pete Bowl would give the eight-team Big East seven guaranteed slots in 2008 (though Notre Dame can take one of them).

The bowl system last expanded in 2006 with the addition of four new games: The BCS’ stand-alone national championship game, the PapaJohns.com game in Birmingham, Toronto’s International Bowl and the New Mexico Bowl. The NCAA’s coinciding move to a 12-game regular-season, along with the elimination of previous restrictions against 6-6 teams and the counting of wins over I-AA opponents, expanded the pool of eligible teams from 59 in 2004 to 73 two years later.

Last season, however, there were only seven eligible teams that did not land bowl invitations. They were Troy, South Carolina, Northwestern, Iowa, Louisville, Ohio and Louisiana-Monroe. Had the three proposed new games already existed, there would have been just one team to spare.

“That’s cutting it pretty close,” said Richard Giannini, Southern Miss’ athletic director and chairman of the NCAA committee that will meet next week.

Recently, Giannini’s committee has green-lighted pretty much every aspiring bowl that’s met the required criteria (the International Bowl required a second try), and despite the perennial cynicism that surrounds such games, so far the marketplace has supported them.

Last year’s 32 bowl games netted an average attendance of 54,078, highest in eight years. The PapaJohns.com Bowl pitting Cincinnati and Southern Miss garnered a modest but respectable 2.26 rating on ESPN2. By comparison, NBA regular-season games on ESPN average a 1.3.

“If the market can bear it, [NCAA schools] have basically voted to have as many bowls as they can,” said Giannini. “If all bowls are stable, basically, the market is saying that having that many bowls is efficient.”

This year, however, Giannini concedes that the committee will have to weigh not only the individual proposals but also the larger issue of whether the pool of teams is large enough. The FBA has asked that the committee proceed cautiously until enough 12-game seasons have been played to produce a more thorough set of data. However, “there may be some concern about how you say yes to some and no to others,” said Ramsey.

Of the three, the St. Pete Bowl seems to pose the best chance of approval due to the backing of four all-important letters: ESPN. In recent years, ESPN Regional Television, the network’s Charlotte-based subdivision, has spearheaded the inception of several new games. It now owns and operates the Las Vegas, Hawaii, New Mexico, Armed Forces and PapaJohns.com bowls.

The St. Petersburg game is the network’s latest venture, which means it already has a guaranteed time slot (though the current scheduled date of Dec. 21 conflicts with a Tampa Bay Bucs game and is expected to changed). Pete Derzis, ESPN Regional’s senior vice president and general manager and brainchild behind the other recently added bowls, spent part of this week meeting with the city’s convention and visitors bureau as well as other local officials. Tropicana Field has been reserved, and the Big East and Conference USA are squarely on board.

“The Big East had expressed interest in an additional Florida experience and had identified St. Petersburg as a possible site,” Derzis said in an e-mail. “We’ve been working with the Big East for quite some time in building a model that we could take to the market. Conference USA had expressed interest in a Florida bowl experience as well.”

The proposed Congressional Bowl in D.C. was the brainchild of two less obvious parties. While watching an NFL game together around the time of the 2006-07 bowl games, Marie Rudolph, director of federal government relations at George Washington University, and Sean Metcalf, director of communications for a D.C. council member, noticed an ad for one of the bowls. “That’s when we realized: Why doesn’t our city have a bowl game?” said Rudolph.

In the 15 months since, the two sports enthusiasts (Rudolph is a Colorado fan; Metcalf claims Hawaii) have immersed themselves in the bowl business, with the help of the D.C. Sports and Entertainment Commission. They have a date (Dec. 20), two possible venues (both RFK Stadium and Nationals Park have been reserved) and an agreement with ESPN.

Most importantly, they’ve secured Navy, which has sent upwards of 25,000 fans to recent bowls in San Diego, Charlotte and Houston. Imagine what the Annapolis, Md., school would draw in its own backyard?

Of course, that’s provided the Midshipmen, which lost renowned coach Paul Johnson to Georgia Tech after last season, become bowl eligible. If they don’t, and if the ACC can’t provide a team, either, the D.C. bowl could be looking at a Ball State-Louisiana-Monroe game. Projected attendance: 27.

The sketchiest of the three games is the proposed Rocky Mountain Bowl, headed by a marketing employee for Salt Lake Community College’s athletic department. The game currently has no set date or television partner. The Mountain West and WAC have expressed interest but neither has formally signed off on it. And Utah, the school whose stadium (Rice-Eccles) the game’s organizers plan to use, wants nothing to do with the bowl, according to a source familiar with the situation.

If there’s concern about running out of teams, this one seems the easiest to ax.

“We have the option to license one, two or all three,” said Giannini. "We look at how many bowl-eligible teams each conference has had. If you have a conference that’s only been averaging six eligible teams and now they want eight bowls, you have to say, ‘Wait a minute.’ "

Even at the current number, fans have groused about the increasing number of 6-6 squads reaching the postseason. Six such teams made the postseason last year (with four of them losing, meaning they went to a bowl yet finished their season below .500), and the addition of more bowls will only increase that number. Of the seven eligible teams left out last season, six were 6-6.

Bowl execs don’t seem to view that as a problem.

“The reality is that I’ve yet to meet a coach who doesn’t want a postseason opportunity,” said ESPN’s Derzis. "If they qualify, their season continues, they get extra practice time, they get a chance to showcase their program on national television, and it truly is positioned as a reward for the players, the staff and the fans.

“… Communities continue to embrace [bowls] and to open their arms to host new ones, and television ratings continue to show that the public has not had their fill of bowls.”

The bowls themselves, however, may be running low on their fill of teams.