David Hale, ESPN Workers WriterAug 6, 2024, 07:00 AM ET
- College football reporter.
- Joined ESPN in 2012.
- Graduate of the College of Delaware.
For Michigan followers, the moment when the Wolverines clinched a national championship in January will echo by means of generations.
For each person else, the most indelible image of the 2023-24 bowl season entails a 6-foot anthropomorphic pastry being diminished into a toaster, baked and devoured by ravenous Kansas Disclose football players to the tune of Donna Summer season’s “Hot Stuff.”
This seems to be gorgeous. Michigan, in spite of every little thing, has 12 national titles. Frosted Strawberry is, to the most effective of somebody’s recordsdata, the utterly mascot ever cooked and consumed by the a hit team.
The gimmick, dreamed up by the folk at Florida Citrus Sports activities as a ability of selling the 2023 Pop-Tarts Bowl in Orlando, Florida, became as soon as a gargantuan coup for the title sponsor. Pop-Tarts earned a reported $12.1 million in media exposure from the game and sold 22 million more Pop-Tarts (or 11 million cellophane packs of two, to make expend of correct breakfast pastry trade rates) than it had the week old to kickoff.
Nevertheless in selling the brand, or now no longer additionally it’s miles totally imaginable that, amid a tumultuous college sports landscape, the Pop-Tarts Bowl confirmed each person a ability ahead. (Smartly, each person other than Frosted Strawberry. His high-tail ended in that toaster.)
“No person’s going to neglect the Frosted Strawberry descending into the toaster,” Matt Repchak, chief advertising and marketing officer for Florida Citrus Sports activities, the host of the Pop-Tarts Bowl, stated. “That would possibly maybe maybe be all of our legacies. Nevertheless at the quit of it, there’s those that made recollections whereas they have been right here, and we’re desirous to upright be a enjoyable section of the college football calendar.”
The top-line numbers around bowl video games are a level of delight, as Bowl Season govt director Slash Carparelli stated. Final three hundred and sixty five days’s bowls have been watched by a mean of 4.4 million folk, essentially essentially based on Carparelli, including 15 video games that averaged more than 3 million viewers, now no longer counting the College Football Playoff. Extra than 190 million folk watched in the direction of bowl season in total. Bowl video games out of doors the College Football Playoff disbursed in extra of $100 million to conferences.
“Bowl video games are undoubtedly popular,” Carparelli stated. “Particular, they create now no longer all element into the national championship equation nevertheless they create now no longer must in snarl to be valuable to each person appealing.”
That’s the laborious recordsdata. The vibes, on the other hand, are a shrimp off.
The checklist of complaints and concerns over bowl season is extensive. Star players opt out of video games to prepare for the NFL draft or offer protection to their draft inventory, and the transfer portal incentivizes heaps of of players to skip bowl season in settle on of free agency. The constructing hit its nadir in last three hundred and sixty five days’s Capital One Orange Bowl when almost two dozen Florida Disclose players sat out — largely as a sing over being now no longer famend of the playoff, essentially essentially based on head coach Mike Norvell. The end result became as soon as an unpleasant 63-3 Georgia safe followed by complaints from Bulldogs coach Kirby Trim that the sport risked ruining bowl video games if it didn’t take care of player attrition.
Florida Disclose’s frustrations over the playoff snub would possibly maybe merely have been a uncommon case, nevertheless the narrative underscored a bigger deliver of affairs: The playoff has sucked most of the oxygen out of the room by ability of college football’s postseason. Bowls out of doors the four-team playoff swiftly turn out to be an afterthought, and with this three hundred and sixty five days’s growth from four to 12 playoff teams, the impact shall be even higher.
Add in conference realignment, which has already successfully killed the Pac-12, and predictions of an eventual broad league (or two), and the future of the bowl system seems to be on shaky floor.
Nevertheless disclose over with the folk tasked with coming up with ways to save the system, and they’re oozing with optimism — and maybe some strawberry filling.
“The world is changing. That’s the constant deliver of the sport,” Repchak stated. “Things are in flux, and this will proceed to be. Nevertheless as always, the bowls will adapt and get dangle of some new ways to have interaction.”
About a of the ways they’re already doing it, in no explicit snarl:
Dumping an infinite bath of mayonnaise on a coach’s head.
Dumping an infinite vat of eggnog on a coach’s head.
Dumping an infinite bucket of Cheez-Its on a coach’s head.
Dumping an infinite bowl of cereal on a coach’s head.
MAYO DUMP. pic.twitter.com/pEqLT19Zc5
— Duke’s Mayo Classic (@DukesMayoBowl) December 28, » …
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