Half-empty stadiums won't stop number of bowls from going up

Six bowls had their smallest crowds on record, with section after section of unoccupied seats a yawning indication of how little buzz there can be for the long list of postseason games.

Half-empty stadiums? Teams with tiny fan bases and mediocre records? Too many bowls?

They aren’t going away. There will be three more next year, bringing the total number of bowl games to 42. That means approximately 65% of the 130 FBS teams will go to a postseason game next season.

But why?

Attendance isn’t necessarily the measure of success. The bowl system generates hundreds of millions of dollars that conferences distribute to their schools. The games are inventory for television programming, and even if the ratings are modest, almost any bowl will draw more eyeballs than something else, particularly on a weekday afternoon.

That’s why ESPN owns 14 bowls, and the network will add two more in the 2020 season even though viewership has trended mostly downward since the playoff era started in 2014.

“It’s an indication of college football’s strength that you could have games that really don’t matter between teams people don’t typically watch that can get over a million viewers,” Sports Media Watch editor Jon Lewis said. “There’s a long way to go before you would see a reduction. In fact, I doubt you’ll see a reduction any time soon. We might be up to 50 bowl games in a decade.”

Regular-season college football attendance has been in decline for years and hit a 22-year low in 2018. While there have been empty seats at the New Year’s Six bowl games — those associated with the College Football Playoff — the bigger postseason blow has been seen elsewhere.

Of 33 second- and third-tier FBS games analyzed by the Associated Press, 23 were played at venues where the announced attendance was less than 75% of capacity. Of those 23, eight were under 50%. The AP did not include the New Year’s Six games in its analysis because of their rotation in the CFP semifinal lineup.

The Football Bowl Association reported attendance for all 39 bowls at 1.661 million, an increase of 27,000 (1.6%).

FBA executive director Wright Waters acknowledged the attendance woes for many of the bowls not among the New Year’s Six. Part of the issue, he said, is there are schools with fan bases that, 20 years ago, were excited about going to most any bowl but now are disappointed if their team isn’t in the CFP mix.

Waters said the FBA plans to form a task force to generate ideas on how to grow attendance.

“That’s your atmosphere,” Waters said of crowd energy. “Would you rather have one person paying $1,000 or have 1,000 people paying a dollar to get in the stadium?”

Average announced attendance for the 33 bowls in the AP analysis was 34,595 this season. That’s 1% higher than 34,215 last season, thanks to the Gator Bowl’s announced crowd of 38,206 for Texas A&M-N.C. State in 2018 growing to 61,789 for Tennessee-Indiana this season.

The games that had their lowest attendances on record were the New Mexico, Cure, Camellia, Pinstripe, First Responder and Famous Idaho Potato bowls.

Announced attendance figures provided by bowl organizers or stadium officials were used by AP. Those numbers — typically derived by counting the number of tickets distributed, game participants, band members and media members — invariably are higher than the actual attendance.

The Las Vegas Bowl had an announced attendance of 34,197, but the scanned ticket count provided to AP by stadium owner UNLV was 16,568. The Birmingham Bowl, played in heavy rain with a lengthy lightning delay, announced 27,193 even though actual attendance was 9,679. The New Mexico Bowl announced a crowd of 18,823, but a San Diego Union-Tribune reporter at the game estimated actual attendance at 6,000.

New Year’s Six games that didn’t host CFP semifinals and were not included in the AP’s analysis took a hit. TV viewership for all four was down. At the stadium, the Cotton Bowl between Penn State and Memphis drew 54,828, the smallest crowd since 1948. The Sugar Bowl between Georgia and Baylor had 55,211, its third sub-60,000 crowd since 2013. The Orange Bowl and Rose Bowl, however, drew near-capacity crowds.

Ohio coach Frank Solich, who was a longtime Nebraska assistant and the Cornhuskers’ head coach from 1998-2003, said he never has had a bad bowl experience.

Solich’s Bobcats beat Nevada in the Famous Idaho Potato Bowl last week in Boise, Idaho, in front of an announced 13,611, a record low for a bowl that has had three iterations since starting in 1997.

“I’ve been in this business 52 years, and I’ve been to all kinds of bowls,” Solich said, “and I enjoyed coaching in the Bahamas Bowl and Potato Bowl every bit as much as coaching in the Rose Bowl. It’s about being on national television. It’s about the players who might not otherwise get to see the mountains.

“It’s about being a competitor. The kids for both teams played their butts off in that game. It’s not about how many people are in the seats.”