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David Hale, ESPN Staff Writer
For Michigan fans, the moment when the Wolverines clinched a national championship in January will echo through generations.
For everyone else, the most indelible image of the 2023-24 bowl season involves a 6-foot anthropomorphic pastry being lowered into a toaster, baked and devoured by ravenous Kansas State football players to the tune of Donna Summer’s “Hot Stuff.”
This seems fair. Michigan, after all, has 12 national titles. Frosted Strawberry is, to the best of anyone’s knowledge, the only mascot ever cooked and consumed by the winning team.
The gimmick, dreamed up by the folks at Florida Citrus Sports as a means of promoting the 2023 Pop-Tarts Bowl in Orlando, Florida, was an enormous 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 use proper breakfast pastry exchange rates) than it had the week prior to kickoff.
But in selling the brand, it’s also entirely possible that, amid a tumultuous college sports landscape, the Pop-Tarts Bowl showed everyone a way forward. (Well, everyone except Frosted Strawberry. His journey ended in that toaster.)
“Nobody’s going to forget the Frosted Strawberry descending into the toaster,” Matt Repchak, chief marketing officer for Florida Citrus Sports, the host of the Pop-Tarts Bowl, said. “That may be all of our legacies. But at the end of it, there’s people who made memories while they were here, and we want to just be a fun part of the college football calendar.”
The top-line numbers around bowl games are a point of pride, as Bowl Season executive director Nick Carparelli said. Last year’s bowls were watched by an average of 4.4 million people, according to Carparelli, including 15 games that averaged more than 3 million viewers, not counting the College Football Playoff. More than 190 million people watched during bowl season in total. Bowl games outside the College Football Playoff distributed in excess of $100 million to conferences.
“Bowl games are really popular,” Carparelli said. “Sure, they don’t all factor into the national championship equation but they don’t have to in order to be meaningful to everyone involved.”
That’s the hard data. The vibes, however, are a bit off.
The list of complaints and concerns over bowl season is extensive. Star players opt out of games to prepare for the NFL draft or protect their draft stock, and the transfer portal incentivizes hundreds of players to skip bowl season in favor of free agency. The trend hit its nadir in last year’s Capital One Orange Bowl when nearly two dozen Florida State players sat out — largely as a protest over being left out of the playoff, according to head coach Mike Norvell. The result was an ugly 63-3 Georgia win followed by complaints from Bulldogs coach Kirby Smart that the sport risked ruining bowl games if it didn’t address player attrition.
Florida State’s frustrations over the playoff snub may have been a unique case, but the narrative underscored a larger issue: The playoff has sucked most of the oxygen out of the room when it comes to college football’s postseason. Bowls outside the four-team playoff quickly become an afterthought, and with this year’s expansion from four to 12 playoff teams, the impact could be even bigger.
Add in conference realignment, which has already effectively killed the Pac-12, and predictions of an eventual super league (or two), and the future of the bowl system appears on shaky ground.
But talk to the folks tasked with coming up with ways to save the system, and they’re oozing with optimism — and perhaps some strawberry filling.
“The world is changing. That’s the constant state of the sport,” Repchak said. “Things are in flux, and it will continue to be. But as always, the bowls will adapt and find some new ways to engage.”
A few of the ways they’re already doing it, in no particular order:
Dumping a giant tub of mayonnaise on a coach’s head.
Dumping a giant vat of eggnog on a coach’s head.
Dumping a giant bucket of Cheez-Its on a coach’s head.
Dumping a giant bowl of cereal on a coach’s head.
MAYO DUMP. pic.twitter.com/pEqLT19Zc5
— Duke’s Mayo Classic (@DukesMayoBowl) December 28, 2023
Hey, it’s a copycat league.
“I don’t like to call it stealing ideas. I call it market research,” Mark Neville, CEO of the DirecTV Holiday Bowl, the game responsible for the eggnog bath, said. “You have to do things to stand apart, and I think bowl games are the best at thinking outside the box.”
Neville echoed the creativity-at-all-costs approach on a Tuesday in late July, just a few hours removed from his latest staff meeting to pitch ideas for generating engagement and interest through silliness in December’s game.
That engagement is best if it at least has the appearance of arising organically. As such, the Duke’s Mayo Bowl celebrates the shirtless guys caught on camera eating directly from the jar with a spoon during the game or setting up the broadcasters with a nice jar of mayo to enjoy between calls. The Cheez-It Citrus Bowl (also operated by Florida Citrus Sports) managed to steal a little buzz from its cousin by advertising that its mascot was not edible. The Pop-Tarts Bowl folks dropped off countless boxes of Pop-Tarts to participating teams, media members and broadcasters and, during this summer’s media blitz, even hosted a Pop-Tarts and beer pairing during the ACC’s annual kickoff event.
It works. The Pop-Tarts Bowl received 15 times more media mentions than any other bowl and eight times the social media traffic of any other December bowl game, according to Florida Citrus Sports’ data analysis.
All of the silliness is possible for two reasons. The first is that those bowls have a title sponsor eager to lean into the fun. The second is the one thing most fans seem to see as a problem: The stakes are low.
“Our young staff is not afraid to try some things,” Danny Morrison, executive director of the Charlotte Sports Foundation, which hosts the Duke’s Mayo Bowl, said. “Some work and some don’t. We want to amplify the game and not take away from it. The game is the No. 1 priority. But if we can do other things to make it fun and relevant, that’s important, too.”
Still, the fun is a reminder that, outside the playoff, these games don’t have to be taken quite so seriously by fans.
When bowls first entered the college football lexicon, there was no expectation they’d be a metric in the larger evaluation of a team’s season. Heck, national titles were handed out before bowl games were played, and until 2000, stats from bowl games didn’t count toward a player’s season tally. Even now, the game’s biggest individual honor, the Heisman Trophy, is handed out weeks before any of its finalists play in the postseason.
What’s so bad, then, about playing bowl games even when the stakes are low? Perhaps it’s just a perception problem.
“These are exhibition games,” Repchak said. “They’re meant to be fun, a good watch on television and a great vacation for the people who come and the teams who are participating, where we can lean into the fun and carve out their own little niche in the hearts and minds of college football fans.”
Projectile foodstuffs and edible mascots are not the only state of play, however. After all, not every bowl has a title sponsor eager to embrace silliness. The MVP of the Guaranteed Rate Bowl doesn’t get to refinance your mortgage, and even the most adventurous coaches probably don’t want a gasoline bath after the Valero Alamo Bowl.
Neville said the staff at the Holiday Bowl had something of “an aha moment” when it hosted a regular-season game between Navy and Notre Dame in 2018. The energy and enthusiasm surrounding the event made it clear the group had been thinking far too narrowly defining its place in the sports landscape.
“That totally changed our scope of work from just being a bowl game to owning and operating three events and [serving] as the sports commission for San Diego,” Neville said.
Now, the rebranded Sports San Diego hosts an in-season college basketball tournament, the California State Games (a statewide Olympics-style event that features upward of 10,000 athletes) and works to bring other signature events, including a recent rugby match between Fiji and New Zealand’s All Blacks.
Before 2018, the Holiday Bowl could reliably count on adding 15,000 or so hotel nights to the city’s tourism coffers. Now, among all events hosted or organized by Sports San Diego, that number is closer to 150,000 annually with a goal to add 100,000 more in the near future.
This hints at another factor often lost in the evaluation of bowl season: Not all bowls are alike. Dozens of bowl games are effectively made-for-TV events. People in seats are not a priority. Instead, these games often host smaller Group of 5 matches and routinely draw more than a million viewers. They’ve done their job.
But others, such as the Valero Alamo Bowl, have loftier intentions.
“We’ve created a holiday tradition,” Derrick Fox, CEO of the Alamo Bowl, said. “It’s locally based, and independent of the teams playing, it does a lot of good for the local economy and lets people experience all San Antonio has to offer.”
Bowls serve many masters: the teams playing, the host cities, the title sponsors, the fans, the TV networks. There is no one metric for success, which often makes it easier to tell the story of their demise.
“The college athletics landscape is changing right before our eyes and nobody can tell you what this is going to look like after these next two years,” Neville said, “and we’re going to have to adapt.”
What changes might be in store?
For one, the playoff model and conference tie-ins could all be rearranged beginning in 2026 — for now, the two remaining Pac-12 schools and 10 outbound ones will continue to receive bids from the Pac-12’s affiliations. Several commissioners have already hinted at expanding the playoff further, which could open the door to more bowl games earning entry into the exclusive club of playoff hosts — something Fox said the Alamo Bowl is already preparing to push for.
The current 12-team playoff hasn’t yet played out, but Morrison wonders if the plan to play opening-round games on campus could be reconsidered, too. It’s one thing for bowls that are used to hosting an annual game each December to host a major event. The pressure for on-campus facilities — often in smaller towns with less infrastructure — to do it with just a few weeks’ notice is a much bigger job. Allowing bowls to host opening-round games, too, could be a boon for the entire system.
Additionally, when the current contracts expire, several bowl directors said they’d be open to nixing conference tie-ins in favor of allowing bowls to select the best overall matchups after the playoff field is set — ideally allowing bowls to secure games between teams with the fewest opt-outs and the most enthusiasm about the game and the venue.
The continued evolution of name, image and likeness and revenue sharing with athletes when (or if) the House vs. NCAA case is settled also opens the door to address some of the issues with opt-outs. Carparelli said he’s hopeful that revenue sharing plans would include requirements that players play in every game in order to receive their full allotment, and several bowl directors indicated a willingness to partner with high-profile players in the NIL space to help ensure their participation. Interestingly, athletes are currently forbidden from doing paid endorsements for specific games or to help sell tickets, and many bowl administrators said the more likely long-term scenario would be for bowls to donate to a school’s collective rather than to pay athletes directly.
But for all the questions and concerns about the future, there’s little hand-wringing about existential threats.
Yes, there are challenges. But bowl games love a challenge.
These are, after all, the people who found a way to toast a sentient Pop-Tart.