Nearly all the bowl games for the G5 conferences are the quid pro quo for ESPN shelling out a ton of money to provide coverage of the schools' athletic programs. They're one way ESPN recoups some of the rights payouts by charging advertisers a bundle to be a part of "Capital One Bowl Week," which is actually more like three weeks. Fan convenience is a secondary, if at all, consideration. The primary purpose is to give ESPN something new to fill time blocks with and to promote the NY6 bowls and the CGP, which are ESPN's real revenue generators, without the usual boring talking heads. (If you watch the replay of the MACCG, you'll notice that most of the announcers' attention during the last half the fourth quarter was about CFP brackets.) If it means having nearly empty stadiums, so be it. That's the way of the world.
To be fair to the announcers in the 4th quarter yesterday, there wasn’t much of a game happening on the field by that point, but I totally agree with you.
To me with the transfer portal now, the bowl games are still good for a few things:
- you get to see the players who have stuck around/exhausted eligibility play one last game for your school. Really looking forward to seeing the career Bobcats play one more time.
- you get to see players from the bench give their best to try and prove to the coaches that they can take those reps next year and try to convince them they don’t need to be focusing on recruiting their position in the portal too much.
- in our case, we get to potentially see the next head coach work and see how he handles the team
- a handful of impact players that could have hit the portal will still play in the game and it will only make you appreciate those guys more.
I will say, if anybody decides to sit out the bowl game this year and later wants to come back after testing the portal I wouldn’t blame them with the coaching situation.