With seemingly random companies like “Bad Boy Mowers” and “Cheribundi Tart Cherry” sponsoring bowls, you may wonder how costly it is to buy the naming rights to a bowl game. While even the cheapest bowls aren’t pocket change, it may not be as expensive as you think.
The cheapest cost to sponsor a bowl game can be estimated at around $500,000. The Birmingham Bowl recently was compensated in that amount from the city for their lack of a sponsor, providing a good estimate on their baseline expectation.
Union Home Mortgage Gasparilla Bowl Signage
However, $500,000 isn’t going to get you the naming rights to a New Years Six game. Capital One reportedly paid up to $25 million to sponsor the Orange Bowl in 2017, and it’s safe to assume that cost has risen quite a bit since then.
Given private companies sponsor these bowls, it’s not always easy to track down exact values. the simple answer is, you could pay anywhere from half a million to upwards of $30 million to sponsor a bowl game depending on how important of a game it is.
If you’re newer to CFB or only follow NFL, the concept of a Bowl Game may confuse you. The simplest way to put it is that it is a game played at the end of the season to reward the great teams and match them up against an equally great competitor they may not often face.
How many bowl games are there?
For the 2022-23 season, there are 43 Bowl Games. This means 86 teams will qualify. Only 2 of these bowls are playoff games with the 4 team playoff model.
How do teams qualify for a bowl game?
Generally, a team is rewarded with a bowl when they finish with a .500 or better record (typically this means getting at least 6 wins). The more wins you get, the better bowl game you’re generally awarded with. However, special committees pick the bowls, and sometimes choose teams over others based on local alumni concentration or the money they could potentially make off bringing a bigger brand to the bowl.
What are the best bowl games?
Orange Bowl Trophy in front of Hard Rock Stadium
The best bowl games are the “New Years 6”, six bowl games played on New Years weekend. These bowls are the Fiesta Bowl, Cotton Bowl, Rose Bowl, Peach Bowl, Sugar Bowl and Orange Bowl. In the current 4 team playoff model, two of these bowl games are playoff games (rotating between them).
Today we announce exciting news – CFB Select has entered a partnership with Homage, one of the finest purveyors of Vintage and Throwback sports apparel. For our loyal college fans, they have a variety of schools throwback designs on site, such as the Ohio State University, Penn State University, Cincinnati and more! You can view all their vintage college football apparel here.
How will this partnership benefit you, the fans? To start off, we’ll be running a giveaway for your choice of Homage apparel kicking off this Saturday, 11/19/22! Turn on Tweet notifications on our profile here, @CFBSelect on Twitter, to make sure you stay in the loop!
Joe Burrow played for LSU in college and plays for Cincinnati in the NFL
If you’re on this site, you’re definitely a big college football fan. Odds are, you like college football more than you like the NFL. But, do you match the rest of the country?
The short answer is no, the NFL is holding its popularity better than college football. Over 5 years, Super Bowl viewership declined -19% while college football championship viewing declined -24%. Of course, the numbers don’t tell the full story.
One things certain, and that’s that NFL has a firm hold on the number one sport in the country. 165 million unique people viewed NFL games last season. College football land at somewhere between half and one quarter of that depending on what metric you use.
However, many points indicate that CFB is experiencing incremental growth. TV ratings grew following the introduction of the playoff before falling during the COVID era (note, NFL ratings fell during this time too). Merchandise sales, though not always the most correlated, point in this direction too; following Georgia’s National Championship, Fanatics saw record sales for college licensed merchandise.
Due to the COVID years weighing down all live sports ratings and lots of moving parts in realignment and TV deals right now, it’s likely the next few years will provide a much more definitive answer on how college football popularity is changing compared to the NFL. Hopefully, intriguing matchups and an unbeatable culture help make this the biggest sport in the country.
UCF Fans and the self proclaimed UCF Twitter Mafia are a rowdy and dedicated bunch
It’s near impossible to be involved in CFB Twitter and not run into the self proclaimed “UCF Twitter Mafia”. They’ll swarm any UCF post, positive or negative, and fill it with Knightro-in-flames gifs and shouts of Charge On! (Or, worse if you’re on their bad side).
But, this crew is not just a dominating force online. In person, UCF fans are quickly becoming some of the most dedicated and rowdy – or, they always were (save a few despicable seasons) and are just finally getting recognized. It makes sense they’d have such number when they boast the largest undergraduate population, but their commitment and energy is even more impressive (or annoying, depending on your POV) than their numbers.
Regardless, as this crew makes it’s presence known and dominates airwaves of all kinds, you have to ask – who will stop them? Who will be the next G5 darling (or even underrated P5) to have a fanbase so strong they can shutout Internet polls and swarm any mention of their name. In 4+ years blogging about CFB on Twitter I’ve never seen a comparable fanbase in terms of their tenacity. So, I invite:
Who’s going to stop them?
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Maryland Football, led by Taulia Tagovailoa, is ready to make some noise this season
Everyone wants their football team to win lots of games, but it’s always even more special when a team comes out of nowhere and defies preseason expectations. Here’s our four picks to make some noise this season and silence the haters:
1. Bowling Green
Bowling Green Football
No offense to the Falcons, but we can imagine Bowling Green isn’t top of mind for many of our readers. However, they return the most overall production this upcoming college football season, and a wide open MAC means we have Scot Loeffler’s Falcons making a long shot run at a conference title.
2. TCU
TCU Football
The Horned Frogs had a pretty middling season last year, just missing a bowl. However, this is the first year Sonny Dykes gets to cook with his own guys recruited, though TCU also boasts one of the highest returning production percentages. TCU will have experiences on all sides of the ball plus some great recruits, and we see Sonny Dykes finally bringing his winning culture to Fort Worth.
3. NC State
Devin Leary, NC State Football
NC State has lots of returning seniors (especially thanks to COVID amendments), an experienced QB in Devin Leary, and a reasonable strength of schedule. Nothing stopping NC State from getting double digit wins, and we expect it will be them or Clemson taking the ACC title. Write down the Wolfpack as must watch TV.
4. Maryland
Taulia Tagovailoa, Maryland Football
Though Taulia may not have met the initial, galactic expectations his brother set for him, he’s been working in silence (more or less) and continually improving on his game. Furthermore, Maryland has finally recruited the supporting players he needs to succeed as well as developing some all American talent (like Biletnikoff contender Rakim Jarrett). Mike Locksley isn’t just building a spoiler team – Maryland could finish Top 3 in the Big Ten East, setting up for even more success down the line.
Follow us on Twitter at @CFBSelect for daily CFB content like this!
Maryland Football, led by Taulia Tagovailoa, is ready to make some noise this season
Everyone wants their football team to win lots of games, but it’s always even more special when a team comes out of nowhere and defies preseason expectations. Here’s our four picks to make some noise this season and silence the haters:
1. Bowling Green
Bowling Green Football
No offense to the Falcons, but we can imagine Bowling Green isn’t top of mind for many of our readers. However, they return the most overall production this upcoming college football season, and a wide open MAC means we have Scot Loeffler’s Falcons making a long shot run at a conference title.
2. TCU
TCU Football
The Horned Frogs had a pretty middling season last year, just missing a bowl. However, this is the first year Sonny Dykes gets to cook with his own guys recruited, though TCU also boasts one of the highest returning production percentages. TCU will have experiences on all sides of the ball plus some great recruits, and we see Sonny’s Dykes finally bringing his winning culture to Fort Worth.
3. NC State
Devin Leary, NC State Football
NC State has lots of returning seniors (especially thanks to COVID amendments), an experienced QB in Devin Leary, and a reasonable strength of schedule. Nothing stopping NC State from getting double digit wins, and we expect it will be them or Clemson taking the ACC title. Write down the Wolfpack as must watch TV.
4. Maryland
Taulia Tagovailoa, Maryland Football
Though Taulia may not have met the initial, galactic expectations his brother set for him, he’s been working in silence (more or less) and continually improving on his game. Furthermore, Maryland has finally recruited the supporting players he needs to succeed as well as developing some all American talent (like Biletnikoff contender Rakim Jarrett). Mike Locksley isn’t just building a spoiler team – Maryland could finish Top 3 in the Big Ten East, setting up for even more success down the line.
Follow us on Twitter at @CFBSelect for daily CFB content like this!
Off-seasons of sports you enjoy age always bad. It’s obvious why, life with sports to look forward to is just better. But, the CFB off-season is a special breed of bad, and here’s why.
1. NIL Updates
The CFB landscape has completely changed. Students are getting paid up to tens of millions to play college football, often through pretty artificial and transparent “endorsements”. While the occasional O Line getting sponsored by a burger chain is hilarious (or someone like DeColdest Crawford getting sponsored by an AC company), these just get old after a while and make many of us sad about the current business of the game.
2. Obsessing over high schoolers
Yes, recruitment is what fuels college football. But, getting push notifications about the latest 16 year old kid to commit to your rival school gets so exhausting when we don’t have the actual sport to watch. Yes, many of us obsess and follow the recruiting trail because we love the game, but it gets tiring.
3. Dealing with rival fanbases online
Meeting rival fans in person can be quite fun. As long as you don’t go full SEC fan and get stabbed by a rival in a parking lot, we all enjoy a good chirp. This is NOT the same on Twitter or Reddit. There’s nothing like going back and forth with some incompetent rival fan who thinks his team is better than yours because they won a few titles before their parents were born. Just get us to the games already where we actually have evidence that our team is better. And if they’re not, there’s always next season.
4. Bad CFB List Articles Online
Who wants to spend their time reading a crappy list article online when you could be watching a game instead. Wait…what?
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There may be no worse feeling than your team having an amazing season and getting snubbed from the College Football Playoff. Only 4 teams can make it, so some amazing teams have missed the cut due to a tough loss or two (or none). So, here we pay homage to those amazing college football teams that just barely missed the cut.
5. 2017 UCF
2017 UCF is an extremely controversial team. They finished the regular season undefeated yet were snubbed from the playoff (though they were not the first G5 team to get this treatment, with Western Michigan being another recent example). Their weaker strength of schedule was held against them. That being said, they beat Auburn in an all timer Peach Bowl, demonstrating they had what it took to beat the big dogs. How many games would they have won had they been let into the playoff?
4. 2018 Ohio State
While many may celebrate Ohio State missing the playoff, you have to admit their 2018 team had a resume worth getting in. Their only regular season loss was a stunning upset from Purdue, 49-20. Despite this bad loss, they beat up on many teams they faced with a very high strength of schedule in the competitive Big Ten East. Perhaps what makes this snub so controversial was that a non conference champion 12-1 Alabama got in over them, after losing to Georgia in the SEC championship game. As we know, that Alabama team would go on to win it all.
3. 2015 Stanford Cardinal
2015 Stanford was greatly hurt by a Week One loss to Northwestern. Their only other loss that season was to a very strong Oregon team, 38-36. While two losses is generally too many to make the playoff, this year had a generally weaker field and Stanford looked like one of the most powerful teams out there. This is less of a playoff snub and more so one of the all around best football teams that just couldn’t get it together when they needed to. At least we’ll never forget Christian McCaffrey tearing up that Rose Bowl game against Iowa.
1. (Tie) 2014 TCU and Baylor
You all knew this would be here. Both TCU and Baylor were absolute forces of nature in 2014. This marked the first ever playoff snub, as this was the first year of the College Football Playoff. Both TCU and Baylor were seen as playoff caliber, with TCU’s only being to Baylor and Baylor’s only loss being to a 2 loss WVU (who would end the regular season 7-5). This snub wasn’t just painful for these fans, but it literally reshaped CFB. The Big 12 did not have a championship game at the time, so both 1 loss Big 12 teams would be left out in favor of conference championship game winners FSU, Oregon, Ohio State and Alabama. Immediately following this, the Big 12 began putting plans in place to reinstate their championship game between the two teams with the best record.
Who do you think was the best College Football Team that didn’t make the playoff? Who was the worst CFP snub? Let us know in the replies!
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