(11-20-2023 06:16 PM)ArmoredUpKnight Wrote:  How about we just convert half of these Post-Season Bowls to Kickoff Games in Week 0-1?

Posted above!

(11-20-2023 06:06 PM)JRsec Wrote:  

(11-20-2023 05:59 PM)Claw Wrote:  The old bowls were created to sell hotel rooms and meals. The new ones are created to fill TV time slots.

We're sports geeks here, but you should not underestimate the power of the hotel/restaurant industry behind the scenes of the bowl game planning. They want games scheduled during the holidays when people will travel.

The last time of the year anyone wants to travel is around Christmas, and then they aren't heading to an also ran bowl, but to family. A lot more people would attend an open game on a Saturday toward the end of August, especially one in a dome. It's also the end of Summer and vacations are in order.

??? - that’s not true. Christmas to New Years is the single biggest vacation week of the year. On the flip side, the last couple of weeks of August have become among the lowest vacation weeks of the year because kids are generally back in school at that point. (School generally starts long before Labor Day in most places and it seems to get earlier every year.) The rates and demand at Disney World are a pretty good indicator of travel demand for any popular bowl destination (e.g. LA, Miami, New Orleans) and the week between Christmas and New Years is the single highest demand time of the entire year. It’s CRAZY. (I know. I’ve been there many times during that period.)

The key to success is to pair a bowl location with a place that people want to travel to during the holidays in general: Florida, California, Arizona, Las Vegas, New Orleans, etc.

(11-20-2023 05:19 PM)Just Joe Wrote:  

(11-19-2023 09:11 PM)Fighting Muskie Wrote:  My general thoughts on the topic:

Create a pre-season (weeks 0 and 00) for FBS vs FCS exhibitions

12 game regular season against exclusively FBS opponents

Peg bowl eligibility to finishing 7-5 or better in the regular season
———

Opening round play off games should be home site affairs

Consolidate non-CFP bowls to the better destinations and consider a double header format or possibly even little 4 team tournaments. (Ex. A Citrus Bowl tournament in Orlando)

You'd be doing away with them entirely and shutting down FCS programs by the dozens. People aren't going to pay to watch an exhibition, not the kind of money that would make it worthwhile. Which means the big programs wouldn't have the money for FCS buy games, which prop those programs up.

You’re assuming I care whether or not FCS programs who are subsidized by taking a dive against one of the big guys survive.

For some inexplicable reason, people pay to watch these awful games now and they still will when they become pre-season games because the schools will make them part of the season ticket and mini-bundle packages.

(11-20-2023 06:50 PM)Frank the Tank Wrote:  

(11-20-2023 06:06 PM)JRsec Wrote:  

(11-20-2023 05:59 PM)Claw Wrote:  The old bowls were created to sell hotel rooms and meals. The new ones are created to fill TV time slots.

We're sports geeks here, but you should not underestimate the power of the hotel/restaurant industry behind the scenes of the bowl game planning. They want games scheduled during the holidays when people will travel.

The last time of the year anyone wants to travel is around Christmas, and then they aren't heading to an also ran bowl, but to family. A lot more people would attend an open game on a Saturday toward the end of August, especially one in a dome. It's also the end of Summer and vacations are in order.

??? - that’s not true. Christmas to New Years is the single biggest vacation week of the year. On the flip side, the last couple of weeks of August have become among the lowest vacation weeks of the year because kids are generally back in school at that point. (School generally starts long before Labor Day in most places and it seems to get earlier every year.) The rates and demand at Disney World are a pretty good indicator of travel demand for any popular bowl destination (e.g. LA, Miami, New Orleans) and the week between Christmas and New Years is the single highest demand time of the entire year. It’s CRAZY. (I know. I’ve been there many times during that period.)

The key to success is to pair a bowl location with a place that people want to travel to during the holidays in general: Florida, California, Arizona, Las Vegas, New Orleans, etc.

The non New Year's Eve/Day bowls are dead in the water Frank. And yes, people travel at Christmas, just not to minor bowls. Jan 1 is a different story. Christmas was over a week ago and they'll take a couple of vacation days to make that game if they are tacked onto normal time off.

And back to my main point since some of you didn't read the earlier post. You pick neutral site venues between the teams you set up play in late August. Remember the Kickoff Classics? Same thing on a broader scale. I suggested a Saturday game in Charlotte for example between N.C. State and Auburn, or Iowa and Ole Miss in Nashville, or Miami and Florida in Jacksonville. The point being whether you agree on which school plays another is that you utilize, or create, minor bowl opportunities for the first game of the season so that when January and the CFP rolls around it has what it will have anyway, the focus of the nation.

The host sites want good travel crowds and exposure for what they have to offer. Well fine. Let them have an opening weekend when the hopes are high for both schools' fans and you'll get your turnout. The networks fill dead space, if it's a distance that can be traveled in a day it doesn't matter if the kiddies just started back to school, and the fans get an event to kick things off, instead of a ho hum the players didn't show end of season BS game for low bucks and a chance of injury. And that's what minor bowls are!

If a reduction in bowl games is necessary then it needs to come from P5 (future P4) conferences since half those schools "don't want to be there anyway". I think G5 players and teams appreciate even the minor bowls more and the extra practice time is beneficial.

(11-20-2023 05:49 PM)Frank the Tank Wrote:  

(11-20-2023 05:19 PM)Just Joe Wrote:  

(11-19-2023 09:11 PM)Fighting Muskie Wrote:  My general thoughts on the topic:

Create a pre-season (weeks 0 and 00) for FBS vs FCS exhibitions

12 game regular season against exclusively FBS opponents

Peg bowl eligibility to finishing 7-5 or better in the regular season
———

Opening round play off games should be home site affairs

Consolidate non-CFP bowls to the better destinations and consider a double header format or possibly even little 4 team tournaments. (Ex. A Citrus Bowl tournament in Orlando)

You'd be doing away with them entirely and shutting down FCS programs by the dozens. People aren't going to pay to watch an exhibition, not the kind of money that would make it worthwhile. Which means the big programs wouldn't have the money for FCS buy games, which prop those programs up.

Yeah - I don’t get the proposals for preseason exhibitions. Look at the NFL wanting to eliminate preseason games - even they know that they are a poor product and essentially just a necessary evil to provide some live game experience for non-starters that you’re not worried if they get hurt.

The entire value of FCS opponents is that they are an inexpensive buy game that counts for bowl eligibility. Eliminating them from regular season records for bowl eligibility purposes kills the value of those FCS games entirely. Personally, I don’t have the heartburn that a lot of fans seem to have about playing them or counting them for bowl eligibility.

FCS vs FBS products are indeed a weak, inferior product. I despise these games and would love to see them abolished altogether but ultimately they are still profitable and as long as they are profitable, they’ll exist. Repackaging them as pre-season games and creating the opportunity for a 13th game to be on the calendar (preferably a good one against a decent opponent) opens even greater opportunity for profit.

As it comes to bowl games, the weaker ones on weird dates and at weird times are going to be in less demand in the CFP-12 era (displaced by opening round games) and these games aren’t really money makers so much as content filler. There’s more money to be made by playing an extra regular season game at home for the whole FBS than placing 6-6 teams in unprofitable bowl games.

The bowl system as it is has to send teams without 6-6 records into games.

Imagine how its going to be when 8 of these teams, seeded 5-12 are playing not in a bowl but on a campus site. That means an additional 8 teams with 5-7 records or below will have to be called in for bowl games.

Moving the bowl qualification line to 7-5 with 6-6 backup should get many of the 6-6 teams into a bowl anyways.

In 2022 a total of 11 G5 teams that finished 6-6 but only 7 P4 team that did so. Considering that 7 more P4 teams will not be bowling because of the 1st round of the playoff I could see where moving the qualifications to 7-5/6-6 from 6-6/5-7 might be helpful to not have to mess around with low level games.

One of the problems with the lesser bowls is that they don't feature traditional conference match-ups. These minor bowls change their names every few years and none of them seem to carry real conference ties. They build no brand value, and offer little prestige, other than matching up a couple of 6-6 G5 programs on TV.

I think they need to remove FCS games from counting toward bowl eligibility, but keep the 6 win standard. I'd also like it if ESPN eliminated the "bowl pool", and allowed each G5 conference to develop real bowl ties along traditional or geographic lines.

You'd have the playoff teams and then all the other bowl eligible teams would play in their set of bowls. It wouldn't be that different, but more efficient and probably entertaining.

(11-20-2023 07:10 PM)Fighting Muskie Wrote:  

(11-20-2023 05:49 PM)Frank the Tank Wrote:  

(11-20-2023 05:19 PM)Just Joe Wrote:  

(11-19-2023 09:11 PM)Fighting Muskie Wrote:  My general thoughts on the topic:

Create a pre-season (weeks 0 and 00) for FBS vs FCS exhibitions

12 game regular season against exclusively FBS opponents

Peg bowl eligibility to finishing 7-5 or better in the regular season
———

Opening round play off games should be home site affairs

Consolidate non-CFP bowls to the better destinations and consider a double header format or possibly even little 4 team tournaments. (Ex. A Citrus Bowl tournament in Orlando)

You'd be doing away with them entirely and shutting down FCS programs by the dozens. People aren't going to pay to watch an exhibition, not the kind of money that would make it worthwhile. Which means the big programs wouldn't have the money for FCS buy games, which prop those programs up.

Yeah - I don’t get the proposals for preseason exhibitions. Look at the NFL wanting to eliminate preseason games - even they know that they are a poor product and essentially just a necessary evil to provide some live game experience for non-starters that you’re not worried if they get hurt.

The entire value of FCS opponents is that they are an inexpensive buy game that counts for bowl eligibility. Eliminating them from regular season records for bowl eligibility purposes kills the value of those FCS games entirely. Personally, I don’t have the heartburn that a lot of fans seem to have about playing them or counting them for bowl eligibility.

FCS vs FBS products are indeed a weak, inferior product. I despise these games and would love to see them abolished altogether but ultimately they are still profitable and as long as they are profitable, they’ll exist. Repackaging them as pre-season games and creating the opportunity for a 13th game to be on the calendar (preferably a good one against a decent opponent) opens even greater opportunity for profit.

As it comes to bowl games, the weaker ones on weird dates and at weird times are going to be in less demand in the CFP-12 era (displaced by opening round games) and these games aren’t really money makers so much as content filler. There’s more money to be made by playing an extra regular season game at home for the whole FBS than placing 6-6 teams in unprofitable bowl games.

I want more Marquee matchups on Labor Day Weekend. Give me the Contractual P5 vs P5. You want to save Traditional Rivalries, give me Bedlam in Week 0 at a neutral site.

Week 0 would be a lot more fun with:
Oklahoma State vs Oklahoma
Texas vs Texas Tech
Florida vs FSU
Miami vs UCF
Oregon vs Oregon State
Washington vs Washington State
Colorado vs Nebraska
Missouri vs Kansas

(11-19-2023 11:04 AM)msm96wolf Wrote:  7-5 would mean bowl reduction, which I am for, but doubt G5 wants or espn want.

The G5 didn't pioneer sending .500 schools to bowl games. The power conferences were the ones that started that. As long as this is evenhanded, I think the G5 could live with moving the standard back to 7-5. These games aren't really a revenue center for us.

ESPN, on the other hand, might not be as pleased. It clearly wants the content.

(11-21-2023 10:31 AM)Schadenfreude Wrote:  

(11-19-2023 11:04 AM)msm96wolf Wrote:  7-5 would mean bowl reduction, which I am for, but doubt G5 wants or espn want.

The G5 didn't pioneer sending .500 schools to bowl games. The power conferences were the ones that started that. As long as this is evenhanded, I think the G5 could live with moving the standard back to 7-5. These games aren't really a revenue center for us.

ESPN, on the other hand, might not be as pleased. It clearly wants the content.

Right because the money made becomes more marginal as you move down the chain to games that mostly feature 6-6 teams.

G5 which operate at a loss, lose even more in the 6-6 games with the very smallest payout. Conference offices (I know at least the MAC does) reimburses schools for travel costs so if they are playing in 4-5 bowls instead of 6-7 that is less in which the conference office has to cover.

Plus higher quality of the games which remain and less timeslot competition.

(11-21-2023 09:42 AM)Side.Show.Joe Wrote:  One of the problems with the lesser bowls is that they don't feature traditional conference match-ups. These minor bowls change their names every few years and none of them seem to carry real conference ties. They build no brand value, and offer little prestige, other than matching up a couple of 6-6 G5 programs on TV.

I think they need to remove FCS games from counting toward bowl eligibility, but keep the 6 win standard. I'd also like it if ESPN eliminated the "bowl pool", and allowed each G5 conference to develop real bowl ties along traditional or geographic lines.

You'd have the playoff teams and then all the other bowl eligible teams would play in their set of bowls. It wouldn't be that different, but more efficient and probably entertaining.

I agree with you here Joe. 6-6 if you play 0 FCS games or 7-5 if you play 1 FCS game. I also don't like the bowl pool as much as traditional ties that help build conference rivalry amongst the G5 schools.

Should we set up a bowl system that pairs teams with the best available non-conference opponent via a NET or RPI like ranking regardless of whether you are G5 vs P4? That way the two teams matching up at least are even via some metric regardless.

(11-20-2023 07:07 PM)JRsec Wrote:  

(11-20-2023 06:50 PM)Frank the Tank Wrote:  

(11-20-2023 06:06 PM)JRsec Wrote:  

(11-20-2023 05:59 PM)Claw Wrote:  The old bowls were created to sell hotel rooms and meals. The new ones are created to fill TV time slots.

We're sports geeks here, but you should not underestimate the power of the hotel/restaurant industry behind the scenes of the bowl game planning. They want games scheduled during the holidays when people will travel.

The last time of the year anyone wants to travel is around Christmas, and then they aren't heading to an also ran bowl, but to family. A lot more people would attend an open game on a Saturday toward the end of August, especially one in a dome. It's also the end of Summer and vacations are in order.

??? - that’s not true. Christmas to New Years is the single biggest vacation week of the year. On the flip side, the last couple of weeks of August have become among the lowest vacation weeks of the year because kids are generally back in school at that point. (School generally starts long before Labor Day in most places and it seems to get earlier every year.) The rates and demand at Disney World are a pretty good indicator of travel demand for any popular bowl destination (e.g. LA, Miami, New Orleans) and the week between Christmas and New Years is the single highest demand time of the entire year. It’s CRAZY. (I know. I’ve been there many times during that period.)

The key to success is to pair a bowl location with a place that people want to travel to during the holidays in general: Florida, California, Arizona, Las Vegas, New Orleans, etc.

The non New Year's Eve/Day bowls are dead in the water Frank. And yes, people travel at Christmas, just not to minor bowls. Jan 1 is a different story. Christmas was over a week ago and they'll take a couple of vacation days to make that game if they are tacked onto normal time off.

And back to my main point since some of you didn't read the earlier post. You pick neutral site venues between the teams you set up play in late August. Remember the Kickoff Classics? Same thing on a broader scale. I suggested a Saturday game in Charlotte for example between N.C. State and Auburn, or Iowa and Ole Miss in Nashville, or Miami and Florida in Jacksonville. The point being whether you agree on which school plays another is that you utilize, or create, minor bowl opportunities for the first game of the season so that when January and the CFP rolls around it has what it will have anyway, the focus of the nation.

The host sites want good travel crowds and exposure for what they have to offer. Well fine. Let them have an opening weekend when the hopes are high for both schools' fans and you'll get your turnout. The networks fill dead space, if it's a distance that can be traveled in a day it doesn't matter if the kiddies just started back to school, and the fans get an event to kick things off, instead of a ho hum the players didn't show end of season BS game for low bucks and a chance of injury. And that's what minor bowls are!

I certainly understand the concept of de facto bowl-like neutral site games such as the Chick-Fil-A kickoff games. I guess I’m not understanding why those would be *replacing* the minor bowls.

Things that make money generally don’t get eliminated. As long as the minor bowls make money for ESPN (and they’re still generally getting higher ratings than even the very best college basketball matchups or regular season NBA games that would be alternative programming that time of year), then I don’t see them going away.

If what you’re proposing is that we’ll get an actual 13th game, I could certainly see that happen with the revenue and expense pressures that were continuously seeing with all of these employment-related lawsuits against the colleges. However, it needs to be an actual 13th game that counts in the standings as opposed to a preseason exhibition. Preseason football is simply *bad* football. The only goal is to get out of those games without your starters getting hurt (if they even play at all).

(11-20-2023 07:10 PM)Fighting Muskie Wrote:  

(11-20-2023 05:49 PM)Frank the Tank Wrote:  

(11-20-2023 05:19 PM)Just Joe Wrote:  

(11-19-2023 09:11 PM)Fighting Muskie Wrote:  My general thoughts on the topic:

Create a pre-season (weeks 0 and 00) for FBS vs FCS exhibitions

12 game regular season against exclusively FBS opponents

Peg bowl eligibility to finishing 7-5 or better in the regular season
———

Opening round play off games should be home site affairs

Consolidate non-CFP bowls to the better destinations and consider a double header format or possibly even little 4 team tournaments. (Ex. A Citrus Bowl tournament in Orlando)

You'd be doing away with them entirely and shutting down FCS programs by the dozens. People aren't going to pay to watch an exhibition, not the kind of money that would make it worthwhile. Which means the big programs wouldn't have the money for FCS buy games, which prop those programs up.

Yeah - I don’t get the proposals for preseason exhibitions. Look at the NFL wanting to eliminate preseason games - even they know that they are a poor product and essentially just a necessary evil to provide some live game experience for non-starters that you’re not worried if they get hurt.

The entire value of FCS opponents is that they are an inexpensive buy game that counts for bowl eligibility. Eliminating them from regular season records for bowl eligibility purposes kills the value of those FCS games entirely. Personally, I don’t have the heartburn that a lot of fans seem to have about playing them or counting them for bowl eligibility.

FCS vs FBS products are indeed a weak, inferior product. I despise these games and would love to see them abolished altogether but ultimately they are still profitable and as long as they are profitable, they’ll exist. Repackaging them as pre-season games and creating the opportunity for a 13th game to be on the calendar (preferably a good one against a decent opponent) opens even greater opportunity for profit.

As it comes to bowl games, the weaker ones on weird dates and at weird times are going to be in less demand in the CFP-12 era (displaced by opening round games) and these games aren’t really money makers so much as content filler. There’s more money to be made by playing an extra regular season game at home for the whole FBS than placing 6-6 teams in unprofitable bowl games.

I think we’re talking past each other here. You keep referring to “preseason” games. Is it an actual 13th regular season game that counts in the standings? If so, then apologies for the misunderstanding. If not, then you’re missing the point. No one wants or should want to play *any* football game against another team at that point of the year unless it’s counting for bowl eligibility.

Does anyone actually watch preseason NFL football around here? If people want to complain about future draft picks sitting out of bowl games these days, just wait to see what types of players that are on the field for any preseason exhibition that doesn’t count in the standings. The starters might play one series and then it’s a total “which backups are we keeping and which ones are we cutting” exercise. THAT is what I mean about an inferior product. You’re at least still getting a full slate of starters in a real FBS vs. FCS game that counts for bowl eligibility until a score gets completely out of hand. You can play exhibition baseball and basketball games where your starters have significant playing time and the competition can still resemble a regular season game, but that’s not the case in football. There’s too much risk to put your most important football players out there when it’s a preseason exhibition.