The Goat Pen

93 Year Old Curmudgen who still thinks the Harvard-Yale game means something and Notre Dame should always automatically play for the National Championship, Fuck You wrote:A heartbreaking column from Stewart Mandel today on the financial carnage being wrought upon the bowls this year. Note the following:

http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/colleg ... &eref=sihp

overall attendance figures declined by more than two percent for the second straight year. According to AL.com's Jon Solomon, this year's average bowl attendance (49,222) was the lowest since 1978-79

and

the announced attendance at the Jan. 2 Sugar Bowl: 54,178. A game featuring Florida, an SEC powerhouse ranked No. 3 in the country, produced the 79-year-old event's lowest attendance total since 1939. Gators fans purchased just 6,500 of their allotted 17,500 tickets to the game.

and

Elsewhere, Florida State sold less than a third of its 17,500-seat allotment to the Orange Bowl, and Nebraska sold only roughly 4,000 Capital One Bowl seats. Even LSU and Clemson failed to sell nearly 13,000 combined tickets for their intriguing, geographically convenient matchup.

Awful. What's worst is the treason being committed against these programs:

For the most part, however, it's become unrealistic for schools to sell expensive full-price tickets when there are drastically cheaper seats available via secondary outlets like StubHub. That site had tickets to the Northwestern-Mississippi State Gator Bowl available for as low as $2.50 leading up to the game.

What I'm concerned about is what happens to the bowl scouts when people refuse to purchase tickets at full price to attend these games. As a bowl selection committee, you can blow off a bowl-eligible BC on Selection Day--that's the smart play of course.

But when Bubba from Shreveport skips out on LSU's Sugar Bowl, or Candi (with an "i") at FSU asks her benefactor to take her to Cancun for New Year's rather than to Miami for the Orange Bowl...well, s**t just got real.

Without ticket sales, bowl selection committees lose their market power. Pretty soon, what you see below will be how it "used to be"...and that's what's heartbreaking in all this:

http://college-football.si.com/2012/02/ ... #more-4947

The Outback Bowl employs five year-round staffers; the Music City Bowl has nine, most of whom double up with duties to the Nashville Sports Council; and the Orange Bowl has 30...
for a game like the Chick-fil-A Bowl, which draws from two of the more voluminous conferences, scouting all potentially eligible teams in person in a single season is a daunting task. Volunteer CFA scouts go out in Week 1 to begin assessing various SEC and ACC squads...

yes, paranoid tailgaters: Visiting scouts assess the campus environment everywhere they go to gauge fan engagement, so look alive out there...

Under the new system, what happens to those trips? If the bowls lose power, does Leeman Bennett have to cut back on his delicious dinners out at the finest restaurants the Southeast and Mid-Atlantic regions have to offer? How is a bowl going to select the most marketable program if they can't get University-paid trips week-after-week to assess each program's suitability to compete in the game? How does the "All-22" game film give you the perspective you get sitting in a luxury box eating free chicken wings and cruidites?

To the student who visits StubHub, it's "I saved a few bucks". To a member of the Team Marketing and Selection Committee, it's real life.