If you’re looking for a reason why the number of bowls exploded from 25 in 2000 to 40 this year, or why those games will showcase 17 .500 teams and three sub-.500 teams, or why a team that lost four games by 30-plus points is facing another team that lost by at least 20 five times, check your living room.
For all the gripes about the overabundance of bowls, the games attract eyeballs.
Case in point: Earlier this month, watching Kentucky freshman Malik Monk put up 47 points at North Carolina in Las Vegas was like seeing something go viral in real time. The game was an instant classic. It drew a 2.4 rating.
The same day, San Diego State handed Houston a routine beating, 34-10, in the relatively innocuous Las Vegas Bowl, with Sam Boyd Stadium three-quarters full. It drew a 2.6 rating.
The numbers weren’t an aberration. March Madness may be college sports’ biggest spectacle, but more people tune in for bowl season.
And therein lies the value in Boston College matching up with Maryland in a battle of 6-6 teams in the Quick Lane Bowl Monday at Ford Field in Detroit.
“There’s a lot of national interest in these games,’’ said BC athletic director Brad Bates. “They’re great matchups, they’re exciting. They’re not all great games, but as we’ve seen in the first week of bowl games, there have been some really good games.’’
Still, such a flood of postseason games leads to the question, how much do they actually mean? The issue became more apparent earlier this month when stars Christian McCaffrey of Stanford and Leonard Fournette of LSU made it known that, with their NFL futures in mind, they would skip their teams’ bowl games.
“I’m not in favor of any of that,’’ said Eagles coach Steve Addazio said. “I don’t understand that.’’
For Addazio, there are tangible benefits for BC being in a bowl. The 15 additional practices are essentially gold to the fourth-year coach, a chance to further develop players. At the same time, the unique experience — in BC’s case, they’ll be hosted by the only bowl owned and operated by an NFL franchise — is a reward.
“The feeling when you go into a city and everyone knows that you and the other team are there to play a game, everyone recognizes you, everyone knows that you had a decent season, you were able to get to a bowl game, you were able to do what you could do,’’ said BC senior running back Myles Willis. “Everyone’s excited to have you and they want to host you in the city.’’
But what schools bank on as much as the experience is the visibility. To Sports Business Journal media writer John Ourand, that exposure is invaluable.
“I think that the main value for schools like Boston College and Maryland is promotional value,’’ Ourand said. “It helps get the name of the school out there. It helps for recruiting, because all of a sudden you have teams that are going to have a national window on a national television network and it’s going to bring in big ratings.
“In the whole scheme of television sports, the NFL by far brings in the biggest ratings. No. 2, by far, is college football. The worst college football bowl game is going to bring in more viewers than some of the best college basketball games that are on the schedule.’’
The stigma for most bowls outside of the College Football Playoff and the New Year’s Six is that they’re largely meaningless. But inside the Eagles’ locker room, getting back to a bowl is by no means an empty accomplishment.
In the week leading up to its final regular-season game, BC weighed the worst-case scenario. The Eagles sat on five wins and didn’t necessarily need to get to six in order to reach a bowl. The team’s Academic Progress Rating put it in position to be selected if not enough teams reached bowl eligibility.
Three teams with sub-.500 records were invited to bowls, but a win over Wake Forest in the regular-season finale made sure the Eagles weren’t one of them.
“I can speak for us,’’ said quarterback Patrick Towles. “I can say that we’re extremely excited. And I think that when you go through as much adversity as we did, I don’t know how we’d be if we didn’t have this kind of sixth game to play for. You’d like to think we’re motivated enough to want to win every game, no matter what we’re playing for. But I think we are. It was small, but there was still a light at the end of the tunnel that we could get to six. Having that to work toward was huge for us.’’
Some incentives for reaching a bowl are more financial. Around the Atlantic Coast Conference, bonuses for coaches who lead their teams to bowls range from $25,000 to $125,000. The details of Addazio’s contract aren’t public, but he received $75,000 in bonuses and incentives a year ago, according to tax returns filed by BC, likely for reaching the Advocate V100 Bowl in 2013, and for the team achieving a certain Academic Progress Rating.
In theory, a bowl game is also lucrative for the schools involved. The reported payout for this year’s Quick Lane Bowl is $1.45 million for each school.
But as Dan Wetzel explained in his pre-College Football Playoff takedown of the bowl system, “Death to the BCS,’’ those payouts can be misleading.
Wetzel wrote, “When athletic departments compare actual payouts with expenses, the collective profits are dramatically slimmer than advertised, and the bowl system is more shakedown than moneymaker. The majority of bowl games leave schools in the red, requiring conferences to pool bowl payouts and take revenue generated by BCS games to cover the losses from lower-tier ones.’’
The recruiting windfall varies, but BC seemingly benefited from returning to a bowl game when Addazio arrived in 2013.
In the years prior, BC was one of the worst recruiting schools in the country. Their 2013 class was ranked 89th by Rivals.com. But Addazio led the Eagles to the Advocate V100 Bowl that year in his first season. In 2014, BC didn’t have any five-star recruits, but its class was ranked 43rd by Rivals. The 2015 class, recruited after the Eagles reached the Pinstripe Bowl, was ranked 49th.
Last year, BC saw the consequences of missing a bowl game. Addazio’s third recruiting class plummeted to 82rd, a setback a rebuilding program cannot afford.
Even as a 6-6 team, returning to a bowl game is critical for a team trying to regain credibility.
“It’s really important to us,’’ Addazio said.
The NCAA won’t add bowl games for at least three years, but there are cities looking to host them. Ourand said the frustration over so many games is understandable, to an extent.
“People are still watching and there’s a tier system in the bowls,’’ he said. “I think if you put too much emphasis or stock into some of these games, yeah, it might look like too much. But if you just view this as just an exhibition game between two teams that won six games and nothing more than that — an exclamation point on a season that was not necessarily bad, certainly not great, but not bad — I don’t see it as too much.
“More importantly, I know ESPN doesn’t see it as too much because it brings in a lot of revenue and a lot of viewers.’’
