TCU Fans To Bust Myth with Travel To a BCS Game

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The BCS is really all about money.  The BCS bowls have one concern over all: Will the bowls make money each year?

The BCS is not about creating the best matchups or rewarding the best teams in college football.

It is most certainly not about crowning a true national champion.

It is about fans travelling to Miami, Phoenix, New Orleans, and SoCal.

It is about people watching college football on TV in January.

The idea that a team will not fill its share of the stadium or draw TV viewers is a huge issue. Outside of the BCS Title Game and the Rose Bowl, the other BCS games struggle to secure adequate television ratings and attendance.

Last year, the Orange Bowl faced a tremendous problem by having ACC champion Virginia Tech play Big East champion Cincinnati. The ratings were the lowest of any BCS bowl ever and thousands of tickets were going unused and being scalped for $0.99. 

As such, the leaders of the BCS bowls have real and valid concerns about the teams they select. None of the bowls wants anything to do with a Big East champion, especially if it is Cincinnati, a largely commuter based school with a very limited tradition of successful football, having finished the final AP Top Twenty-Five only twice, for the 2007 and '08 seasons.

Now, with the threat of Cincinnati returning to a BCS bowl very real, as well as the nation's current economic situation, the BCS bowls will be especially sensitive to having good draws at their bowl games.

TCU Fans Do Not Travel?

An odd myth has been spreading around the college football world recently that needs to be addressed.

I have read and heard it several times in the last few days, mostly from "experts" from ESPN.

Simply put, it is that TCU fans would not travel to a BCS game in large numbers, while Boise fans would do so, making Boise more attractive than TCU to the money-men behind the BCS bowls.

Let's put this to bed immediately.

TCU would take the full 17,500 tickets for a BCS game and likely ask for more.

How could this be when TCU only average 35,000 a game?

How could this be when TCU is a "small" private school?

For the uninformed, TCU is a private school with undergraduate enrollment of 7,411.  In comparison, the 11 private BCS schools have average enrollment of just over 9,000, with only one school, USC, having an undergraduate population over 15,000.

TCU has the second largest undergraduate population of the private schools outside of the Big Six conferences. 

BYU, with a undergraduate enrollment of around 30,000, is the only private school that rivals the major state schools in undergraduate enrollment.

TCU has about 71,500 living alumni.

All this is well and good and demonstrates that TCU is comparable at least to the other major private schools in college football, but this is not why TCU will sell out its allotment and ask for more.

It is about money.

TCU is a relatively wealthy institution full of rich undergraduates and alumni with a lot of money to spend.  

TCU students and alumni can afford to travel to a BCS bowl game and would do so in large numbers.

And they would spend a lot of money doing so.

TCU has been to major bowls before, having gone to the Sugar Bowl two times, the Orange Bowl once, and the Cotton Bowl six times.

So, tell all the ESPN "experts", please stop repeating the myth that TCU will not travel to a BCS bowl.  TCU will go and paint the town purple while waiting for their beloved Frogs to show the country the best football in America.

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