The football bowl system has serious flaws, but it means lots of money. Image: Flickr / aheram / CC-BY
In college football, the 2010-2011 bowl schedule is the biggest deal there is. Not only does the football bowl schedule determine the social lives of those who follow college bowls, it involves much more. There have been calls to reform the college football bowl schedule and system, but the amount of money involved means it may not happen anytime soon.
2010 bowl matchups schedule finalized
The full list of 2010 bowl matchups has been finalized. The 2010 college football bowl schedule starts at 2 p.m. Eastern time on Dec. 18, and runs until Jan. 10, 2011. These bowl matchups pit various college football teams from dozens of conferences against one another. In the end, the BCS National Championship Game determines the winner of the NCAA Division I Football season.
2010 and 2011 college football bowl schedule means money
College football is, put mildly, big money. Not only for the colleges involved, but for television networks and advertisers. Just taking a look at the names of the 2010 college football bowls gives a feeling for how big of business it is. The “Kraft Fight Hunger Bowl,” the “Tostidos Bowl,” the “Rose Bowl Game presented by Citi,” even the “Little Caesars Pizza” bowl. The sponsorships for these games easily hit millions of dollars. The payout, per-team, for the football bowl games run from $750,000 to $17 million.
Calls to reform the college football bowl schedule
With so much money at stake, there are lots of players beyond the football teams in the football bowl game system. This is the only NCAA sport that is not determined by a standard system that matches winners against winners. The college bowl system relies not only on the win-loss ratios of teams, but on computer rankings and conference champions. There have been calls to reform the college football bowl system to give smaller teams a more fair shake, but with the huge amount of money involved, it is not likely it will be reformed in the next few years.
"There have been calls to reform the college football bowl system to give smaller teams a more fair shake" A fair shake of what? The best players go to the best schools. The best schools play the best football. People and sponsors in baseball, as just one of many examples, pay the big bucks to see the best pro teams. Most people won't pay to see a minor league game nor will sponsors give them the big bucks because, frankly, they haven't earned it. Why should a college that isn't really all that interested in putting together a good "football" program get money from a system that they neither contribute to nor participate in? The "fair shake" is that for virtually all conferences, the bowl pay outs are evenly distributed to all of the teams in the conference.