Each season, there are 40 NCAA Division 1 Football Bowl Subdivision bowl games, most of which serve no real purpose.
Although there is a College Football Playoff national championship game, most bowl games have nothing to do with that process. A committee picks four teams that play in two bowl games, and the winners of those games go on to play in the championship. Of the remaining 37 games, some are useful, entertaining, and important. The rest are pretty useless, and some even downright harmful to colleges.
Money is the reason so many bowl games exist. ESPN spends billions and billions of dollars to air the College Football Playoff games and airs most of the rest of the bowl games, from the useless Bahamas Bowl on Dec. 20 (Buffalo vs. Charlotte) to the prestigious Rose Bowl (Oregon vs. Wisconsin) on Jan. 1. While allowing 78 of the 130 FBS teams to participate in bowl games deflates their value, it creates added value for the NCAA, ESPN, and overpaid bowl game CEOs who are paid more than seven figures to take care of the games’ logistics.
The downside, however, is that sometimes colleges lose money under this arrangement.
Under the current bowl game guidelines, participating teams must sell a specific number of tickets to their respective games to generate revenue. The number varies by school size and the bowl game the team is playing in. If tickets go unsold, the school must buy the rest.
Bowl games are held at neutral sites across the country during finals week and winter break, depending on the game and the school. As a result, there are games where many tickets go unsold, especially when the secondary market features tickets well below face value.
The bottom-tier bowl game teams and smaller schools have a difficult time finding enough people to come watch them play. After all, there have been bowl games featuring teams with losing records over the years, and 6-6 teams playing in bowls is common.
The result? According to USA Today, in 2017, schools ate a combined $25 million in unsold ticket costs to play in bowl games.
The University of Connecticut’s 2011 Fiesta Bowl appearance is among the most well-documented instances. According to the Connecticut Post, UConn, a public college, lost nearly $1.8 million on the game. Largely because the 25th ranked Huskies were expected to lose to #9 Oklahoma and because the game was across the country near Phoenix, UConn sold just 2,771 tickets out of the 17,500 the NCAA demanded.
The Indiana Hoosiers lost money in back-to-back years on bowl games, after thousands of their tickets to the Pinstripe Bowl and the Foster Farms Bowl went unsold in 2015 and 2016.
It has even gotten to the point where some teams refuse to play in particular bowl games because they don’t see enough upside in competing. This was one reason Missouri decided against playing in a bowl in 2015 when they went 5-7. In 2012, the 9-3 Louisiana Tech Bulldogs were invited to the Independence Bowl but held out for a more prominent game with a higher payout and ended up going to no bowl at all.
There are, on average, 10 to 20 teams per season that lose money on bowl games each year. Sometimes, it’s a smaller margin, such as the $25,000 Boise State lost last year in the indefinitely postponed First Responders Bowl. However, there is also potential for the type of seven-figure loss that UConn experienced.
There would be less of a threat of this happening if there were fewer bowl games and only the top teams competed for high-payout bowl games. If only elite teams competed in high-payout bowl games, the chances of teams losing money would decrease. However, when ESPN needs filler content because they paid the NCAA a bunch of money, someone has to play in the Bahamas Bowl or the Quick Lane Bowl.
Perhaps 19 bowl games would be appropriate: one championship game, one consolation game for the two teams who missed out on the championship, 15 bowl games for the top 30 ranked teams, and two for the nation’s military schools (Army, Navy, and Air Force).
It’s unlikely there will be any major reduction in the number of bowl games, but, in an ideal situation, the last game of the season would be worth something.
Tom Joyce (@TomJoyceSports) is a freelance writer who has been published with USA Today, the Boston Globe, Newsday, ESPN, the Detroit Free Press, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, the Federalist, and a number of other media outlets.
