http://coachingsearch.com/article?a=Pat-Fitzgerald-If-you...

"Some media and fans have compared so many bowl games to a “participation trophy,” but it’s really another opportunity to compete, including practices and strength training. It’s also a free trip for many players who may not be able to make such a trip otherwise. From a fan perspective, you get to watch more football, so what's the issue?

“There is no such thing as a meaningless game. You’re only guaranteed X amount of games in college. Injury and everything are a major part of that,” Fitzgerald said. “For us to be in the postseason, to be in Yankee Stadium and play in the New Era Pinstripe Bowl against an outstanding opponent, this is a great opportunity for our program, and I know our guys are excited about it.”

How is it that they're the only view that matters? The empty stadiums and flaccid rating suggest fans have a view too. These bowls of .500 or even losing teams are just there to feed the rapacious maw of ESPN and a handful of bowl organizers. If bowls were something that fewer than half of all teams did, they might all have some meaning. When 6-7 Mississippi State gets lucky to reach .500 by squeaking past Fiami at 11 a.m. on Boxing Day, bowls just may have jumped the shark.

What a surprise...this poster follows the most hoary, traditional viewpoint possible.

Hammer meets nail. It is all about ESPN and their need to fill content. Live sports are better for them than yet another "Around the Horn" - one of the reasons they continue to shed "personalities." So they create bowls. 13 of the 42 bowls are now owned and operated by ESPN - double over the past few years - expect that to continue to grow. All but 4 (of the 42) are broadcast on either ESPN or ABC. ESPN could care less about butts in seats. They need the content - and the content does just fine by them. I have not seen the overnights for last week's game. I do know the last time we played Troy we drew a 1.3 rating. Bad? Yes the lowest rating for any bowl that year. YET - higher than ESPN averages for their Sunday night baseball. Part of a $5.6 BILLION 8 year contract with MLB. A few hundred thousand on a bowl? A bargain. Having the list of bowls also helps in ad sales as ESPN bundles all the bowls together - they do not sell only the Dollar General game.

So ESPN needs the content - therefore they need the teams on the field. So as long as ADs/Coaches/players say let's play, there will be the long list of bowl games. And per Alan - why would a coach or AD decline? Bowls mean bonuses. What about at the League commissioner level? Even more bonus money. And ESPN uses its clout to leverage leagues and schools to play by tying into other contracts. MAC is prime example. ESPN needs content - Hello MACAction on Tuesday and Wednesday nights. Not surprising that MAC teams played in 3 of the ESPN owned bowls this year and often play in the Potato (ESPN owned) and were rumored to play in the Boca Raton bowl. Schools and leagues will not decline a bowl bid for fear of pissing off ESPN.

But if fans don't attend the games, they will shut down...right? The ESPN money helps alleviate that issue. Remember, even the ESPN bowls have sponsors "Popeye's Bahamas Bowl" - - who use the game for PR, marketing and corporate perks - e.g., Popeye franchisees were taken to the game by corporate. so you now have two pockets filling the wallet of the local group. Also know that the local "bowl committee" is often run by pretty powerful movers and shakers in the community, so they often get what they want (and money).

So who wins?
ESPN wins. Coaches/ADs/conference leaders win. Sponsors win because ESPN offsets costs. Local leaders win...follow that money.

Who loses?
local economies that don't draw in money as fans stay away (but remember local civic leaders do win), and the team's fans that either get gouged on travel costs, or simply tire of playing in same old same old.

Undecided?
The players. Player play, that is what they do. For the reasons highlighted by Fitzgerald, the players want to play. A few are starting to say no. Of course that was reacted to with scorn by most around the country and on this board.

To tie this in to the NFL ratings thread.

T.V. controls college and professional sports.

Great example is the NFL "Flex" schedule.

My family has had season tickets for the Giants since 1976.

Beginning of the year you got your tickets and made your plans accordingly.

Now the kickoff time for 5 of the 8 home games is subject to change.

Plus,under Flex,you can get only 1 week's notice of the time change.

Since the Giants homes games are sold out,they don't care what gets done to the home schedule.Their money is in the bank.

Same with bowls.
If ESPN and a sponsor is paying the bills,why not have a bunch of bowl games.

One additional positive for appearing in any televised bowl is that its a 3+ hour commercial for you school.

One man's opinion: Live sports content is where online advertising was in the early 2000s. A lot of money being poured into a product that ultimately reaches relatively few people. Someday soon, it will become clear that a lot fewer eyeballs are watching intently than originally imagined and there are cheaper, more effective ways to market and the system will implode.

Disney has been battening the hatches for a couple years now. Any system that delivers D2 college basketball and professional drone racing to my house for free with repetitive placeholder ads is one doomed to fail. Seriously. They've overextended themselves. The gigantic events are watched, but they've tied a bunch of dead weight onto them and overpaid for the rights. (Sadly, I believe the MAC is one of those dead weights they paid tens of millions of dollars for. That money is going to be disappearing soon.)

We've already started to see Disney push the on-air personalities it hasn't cast off to be more active with advertising campaigns to add value. That means the advertisers aren't getting enough bang for the buck already. We're going to start to see more and more concessions to the advertisers in terms of integrating their products into the content. It's a bad road to go down. They're little by little devaluing their own advertising space and brand. They're being held ransom by their own advertisers. We've watched it happen in newspapers and in radio. It's finally reached the television screen.

I know this all sounds amateurish (and it is), but I really believe advertising is becoming less and less effective as it ages, as we all become more and more attuned to the tricks and gimmicks.

Then again, not to go all alarmist Alvin Toffler or anything, I think we're living in a sports bubble that formed in the 1980s and is about to burst. We poured the same amount of dedication, hard work and thought into sports over the past 40 years that we used to save for the space program, warfare, good governance, industrialization. We've literally wasted a lot of the world's skills on managing sports franchises. Look, I'm a post-modernist and believe we can create and build value based on anything and that it's the inherent right of every human being to do just that, but we can't keep using 100 percent of our finest, rarest resource — our attention spans — on games, whether they be sports, video games or social media. If we do, reality will create a wall we'll speed headlong into.

Nice thought provoking discussion, Brian. I have mixed emotions about this, though. On the one hand, you're right - we could accomplish a lot in the time we spend on sports and/or video games. On the other hand, as robots take over more and more things (e.g. driverless trucks to replace the current human drivers, robots to replace order takers and cooks in fast food restaurants as minimum wages rise, increasingly robotized factories, etc), perhaps we will go the other way, and turn more and more to sports to make us feel relevant.

#1 Dollar General Bowl:
Attendance: 32,377
TV Views: 2.5 Million

#2 Frozen:
Attendance: 0
TV Views: 2.4 Million

Really interesting stuff! Made me think about an element I hadn't considered. Thanks!

On the same level when a kid verbals to a college in HS he should probably just sit out the rest of the season to guard against injury and losing his scholarship.


And it's amazing this conversation is going on and yet the same people want to see a larger playoff equaling playing more games.

Reading this thead's exchange, a couple of thoughts popped into this aging mind.

* Why should a young person join the armed services? After all, he or she could get shot - or worse.

* Color me old school. With Stanford as an alma mater notwithstanding, I found myself cringing at McCaffrey's decision to quit the team before its bowl. His teammates applauding his choice didn't alter my thinking. I wonder if, in years to come, it might alter theirs.

allen. Were we at the qualification range the above would not score Expert, nor Sharpshooter, not even Marksman referred to as a Bolo Badge.

Not sure this point has been specifically made...Live attendance is certainly nice to have. The excitement of a big and/or fun game (Army-Navy) drawing a big live crowd is great. But so long as tv viewership is big, live attendance is not nearly as meaningful as it used to be.


Eyeballs...not so much fannies in seats live at the venue.