(03-31-2015 07:00 AM)rath v2.0 Wrote: This bowl lineup is so bad comparitively it makes Hillary Clinton look like Kate Upton. Both are blondish, right?
Lets at least deal with real data before we
on a new bowl -
This from a TV exec -
In 1995-96, there were 18 bowl games. Now there are 38, plus a national championship game — four more bowls than last season, including two at stadiums that seat just 25,000 and 15,000. Next year, bowl organizers are set to add another new lower-tier game that might be fortunate to draw more than 25,000 fans.
That's because even though ticket demand is relatively low for lesser bowls, millions of viewers keep watching, even if it's the Camellia Bowl in Montgomery, Ala., a game that drew just 20,256 fans last week but attracted an average television audience of 1,114,000, according to ESPN.
Last season, schools and conferences again struggled to sell their bowl ticket allotments and were required to pay for a record $23.8 million in unsold tickets, according to NCAA financial records. Many bowl games in recent years also have tried to offload tickets on discount sites such as Groupon.
But on television, bowl games are a sure thing, having drawn much larger audiences than other sports programming, not to mention other content on other channels. And that's what really matters these days.
"Fans are voting with their remotes and with their eyeballs," said Ilan Ben-Hanan, ESPN's vice president for programming and acquisitions. "I take issue with the notion of judging what's a good idea based on how many people are in the stands. There are a lot of sports out there that would kill to have tens of thousands of people in the stands."
Only one bowl game last year drew fewer than 1.2 million viewers on average, according to Nielsen. That's better than the 1.1 million who watched an opening day baseball game last year between the New York Yankees and Boston Red Sox. Nationally broadcast regular season baseball games in 2012 and 2013 averaged about 680,000 viewers.
