(01-05-2019 11:51 AM)quo vadis Wrote:  

(01-05-2019 11:31 AM)bullet Wrote:  

(01-05-2019 08:10 AM)quo vadis Wrote:  

(01-04-2019 08:12 PM)bullet Wrote:  Texas turned the Rose Bowl burnt orange twice. TCU's purple matched the Wisconsin red in the Rose.

Right, but would Texas have turned say FedEx Field burnt orange the week after they turned the Rose Bowl burn orange?

Remember, the Clemson and Alabama fan bases just traveled 600+ miles to Dallas and Miami respectively just last week.

Yes.

Clemson and Alabama would do it as well if they hadn't been doing it for 4 or 5 years running.

The hotels and bowl tickets are expensive. Time off, especially, after the New Year, is tough. People won't do it year after year.

Now if you expand to 8, the semis will be tougher to fill even if it is new teams. But that's ok.

It is? The only reason anyone in any sport ever expands playoffs is because they think it will make more money. If attendance at more playoff games is going to be down, that could be costly.

No major pro sport holds playoff games at a neutral site, with the Super Bowl being the one-game exception that works because NFL teams have fans from all over but mostly because people with money want to be there even if they don't care about the teams that are in the game.

College basketball does three weeks in a row at nominally neutral sites, but...

1) The first week has 8 participating teams in each arena, and the committee puts higher seeds very close to home whenever possible, e.g. Duke in Greensboro or KU in Kansas City, to sell more tickets. And of course there are far fewer tickets to sell in an arena than in an NFL stadium.

2) The second week still has 4 participating teams in each arena, usually has at least one reasonably close team in each regional, and, obviously, still has far fewer seats to fill than in an NFL stadium.

3) The final four has 4 participating teams, has been built up as a major event, and even though it's played in a stadium (ugh), the NCAA distributes most of the tickets to corporate sponsors, to coaches of various college teams, and some to each participating team, with only a few thousand available to the general public. If there were only a few thousand CFB championship game tickets available to the general public, the people who are spazzing out about StubHub ticket prices would have to find something else to spaz out about.