Read this at the end of a Peach Bowl article today. Any thoughts on why/what this means?

Attendance was 65,706, ending the Peach Bowl's streak of 17 consecutive sellouts.

The bowl is sponsored by Chick-fil-A.

A fading SEC team with less history than the elites in its league against a jilted P5 team that every thinks it should be playing tomorrow.

That, along with the usual reasons not to attend a bowl game (cost, travel planning, better to watch on TV, etc.).

Due to the Playoff and their structuring of the "New Year's Six", the time of the game was moved from its typical prime time spot (it has been at 7 or 8 PM on NYE lately, and when not on NYE it was always at night at least) to 12:30 PM, which is a terrible time for a game.

Usually lunch time bowls are the crap ones, not the Peach Bowl (which has generally been considered a higher tier bowl, hence its inclusion in the New Year's Six) There's no way that helped anything.

I noticed the same thing when I flipped the channel. The upper decks in end zones are empty and a lot of orange seats everywhere. My wife noticed it immediately.

The powers that be fought the playoff for a long time out of fear that the non-playoff bowls would then become irrelevant (as if they were actually relevant). Perhaps it will be time to go to a full-fledged playoff, and make all the bowls relevant.

Pete,
TCU may not have brought have the stadium but they sure "brought the Wood shed"!

Could this be the real reason A&M is playing today instead of TCU? No matter what the bull about the best teams they still have tv and the local hosts to please.

Maybe some of you missed the article about playing the games with no fans present. It seems to be all about the ratings that are going very well for the lesser bowls at least. 24/7 TV sports may be impacting fan attendance more than we think.
Regarding the Bahamas bowl, why would anyone expect more than a few thousands attending such a game? It's all for TV.

Bowl games are scheduled now to please ESPN, which airs all but two, I think; CBS still has the Sun Bowl and I think Fox still has one. Until sometime in the '80s or '90s NBC had the Rose and Orange Bowls, CBS had the Cotton and ABC had the Sugar and (I think) the Gator, which all ran NYE or NYD. Cotton and Gator would run NYD afternoon, Rose would start at 4:45 and Orange would go around 8:30. Sometimes Sugar would go New Year's night, but most times it would be NYE night. Then bowls like Outback, Fiesta and some others wanted to be on NYD, so there were as many as seven or eight on NYD. Although the games got good overall ratings. the ratings for each game airing opposite another game suffered. Someone at ESPN has determined that it's better not to counter-program against itself so much and has spread out the games. That's why Peach and some others that used to have prime time slots are now starting at noon on 12/30 or 31. It's not to boost their ratings so much as it is to not harm the ratings of the "more important" bowls.

And OSU lost to VaTech, who lost to Pitt, who lost to Akron, who lost to OUr beloved institution. So why are we not in the discussion?😳