BOWLED OVER OR OVERBOWLED?

 

               In the beginning, 1902, a group of farseeing civic boosters in Pasadena, California, decided to call attention to their balmy environs by inviting a couple of college football teams to supplement their city's Rose Parade and play a New Year’s Day game under the title East-West Tournament. The U’s of Michigan and Stanford accepted, the maize and blue winning, 49-0.

               The game then went into hiatus until 1916, when it was revived on an annual basis at the Tournament Park field near the Caltech campus. In 1923 it was moved to the newly completed Rose Bowl stadium, and renamed.

Pasadena’s Rose Bowl stood alone as a post-regular-season college-football event until 1935, when it was joined by the Sugar Bowl in New Orleans. In 1937 the Cotton Bowl in Dallas, the Orange Bowl in Miami and the Sun Bowl in El Paso, Texas, came aboard.

The idea spread slowly at first­­—in 1950 there were just eight bowl games and in 1970 only 11. From there the line on the graph zoomed, to 20 games in 1997, 30 in 2006, 40 in 2015 and the present 42, 43 if you include the national championship contest, this year set for January 9 in SoFi Stadium in Inglewood, California, the new home of the National Football League’s Los Angeles Rams.

 Once a reward for a season well played, bowl games now also celebrate mediocrity, with teams with 6-6 won-lost records qualifying and ones with 5-7 marks annually slipping in (5-7 Rice will grace the Lending Tree Bowl in Mobile, Alabama, on December 17). Once occupying only the Christmas-New Year week, the bowl season now runs from December 16 through the above-noted January 9.  Seemingly, every burg with a whistle to toot, and a corporate sponsor to back it, now has a bowl game, including frosty-clime Boston, Detroit and New York. Orlando, Florida, has three, and several cities have two.

 There are overlapping bowls-- the Armed Forces Bowl in Ft. Worth, Texas, and the Military Bowl, in Annapolis, Maryland. There are enough goofily named ones to amuse someone like me, including the Cheez-It Bowl, the Duke’s Mayo Bowl and the Famous Idaho Potato Bowl. The Gasparilla Bowl in Tampa, Florida, celebrates Jose Gasparilla, a pirate who may or may not have plundered the Caribbean during the late 18^th and early 19^th centuries. If you bought a ticket to the Frisco Bowl you’d better go to Frisco, Texas (it’s near Dallas), not San Fran.

Like everything else about college sports in these United States, bowl games are about money. The main engine in that department is ESPN, the all-sports network group, which airs most of them. The network pays up big for rights to the college football playoffs but considerably less for the lesser bowls that consume much of its air time during the December-January period. Still, its largess, plus that of individual-game sponsors, is what keeps the early games going despite the empty stadium seats you often see when you tune in.

Schools will reap an estimated $500 million in bowl revenues this year. Most of the money is negotiated by and distributed through the sports conferences, with each conference member—bowl-eligible or not—sharing in the proceeds. Each conference involved in the Rose, Orange and Sugar bowls will share $74 million under current contracts.  Expenses of the competing teams will consume about a quarter of the total; football players eat a lot, you know.

And also like everything else in college sports, football-bowl-season numbers go in just one direction—up.  That was made clear a couple of weeks ago when the schools announced that their championship-playoff fields would be expanded to 12 teams from the present four starting in 2024.  That would add two more rounds—and two weeks—to the season and mean that at least two teams’ schedules could stretch to an NFL-length 17 games.

               The U’s can do such things unhindered because they have no unions or other organized groups to say nay. While it’s no longer correct to say that college athletes no longer are unpaid—in addition to their scholarships many of them get “cost of attendance” payments of several thousand dollars a year plus whatever they can hustle up for the use of their names, images or likenesses— they have no control over the conditions of their employment. Even the cheesiest football bowl game adds about a month to their practice schedules, time that otherwise could be devoted to studies (for those who care about such things) or to holiday time back home.

               Football being a rough game, it also adds to bodily wear and tear and increases the chance of career-threatening injury. Like powerless people in other situations, college footballers who balk are left to “vote with their feet,” which is to say decline to participate in bowls. A growing number of players with professional aspirations are doing just that every year, and who can blame them?  Sounds like a smart move to me.