Bowl Partnerships: How Much Is Too Much?

For as long as I, or anyone, can remember college bowl games have been sponsored by companies as another way to get their image out into a post-Christmas world.

Fed-Ex, Meineke, Allstate, and Tostitos are only a few of the corporate sponsors that back these amateur events at the end of December and the beginning of January every year and gain relatively inexpensive advertising space for backing the games.

Since the Tournament of Roses backed the Tournament East-West game in 1902 and started regularly backing the Rose Bowl in 1916, bowl games have been created to promote warmer climates at the beginning of every new year, bringing tourism to areas such as Southern California, Florida, or Texas, depending on the bowl game.

While the games, and sponsors, have always been named long in advance so that fans could get to the games, have often hid their name behind a "Rose," "Sugar," "Orange" or "Fiesta" (again, depending on the sunny destination the game was played in), sponsors hid their names and let the players play.

Even in the early days of television we saw Mobil sponsor the Cotton Bowl, and while Mobil stamped their name on the game it almost seemed secondary to the sporting event.

The event was still football and was still watched for the love of the game.

But these days I get the feeling that people are starting to care less about the game and more about the sponsorship. Just like the Super Bowl has become an inflated form of its former glory, these arenas of amateur play have started to look more and more like corporate sponsored events than football games.

Corporate logos and images bombard the public while die-hard fans of their favorite teams are left to wait until the commercial break is over to start the game up again.

The number of bowl games also seems irrationally high. In the ACC alone, nine of the twelve teams will be eligible for bowl play at the end of their seasons. That means only three teams will narrowly miss the postseason and the chance to go "bowling" as it were.

In the past eight years there have been over twelve new bowls made, and none of them have the prestige of the Rose, Sugar, Orange, or Cotton Bowls ever had.

I feel the idea that a team like Notre Dame, which posted a 6-6 season last year, has no reason to go to a bowl game—bowl games should be reserved for the first and second finishers in a division, and then maybe the third place finisher overall.

It's almost as if we're promoting losing records, allowing teams to go into the postseason because the head of a corporation is an alum, or because it will bring more press to the school. 

Bowl games should mean something to teams. Earning a place to play at the Sugar Bowl should be no different than going to the BCS Championship. And corporations should let their name fall below the name of the bowl so that those playing in it have more prestige saying that it was brought to you by them and not Lays Potato Chips.

Originally Posted on SportInformant.com

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