New Year, Brand New Ballgame

Once upon a time, New Year's Day and college football lived in perfect harmony.  You would rise slowly in the late morning, ingest the parades to soak up the hangover, serve up a little Hoppin' John for you and the neighbors, and then watch hour upon hour of the biggest games in the sport -- the Cotton Bowl, the Orange Bowl, the Sugar Bowl and the Rose Bowl -- often with the National Championship at stake.

But then in 1998, the NCAA created the Bowl Championship Series, which made tons of money for certain schools and conferences, but ruined the magic of New Year's Day, which retreated from its full-blossom glory to became a wasteland of lesser bowl games and a magical gold mine for a National Hockey League enterprise.  Two recent developments, however, are promising to allow college football to kickoff a brand new era as it kicks off the year.

The first is the obvious and inevitable development of a playoff system, warts and all.  The 21st Century sports world simply demands a clear result, and after years of debate and typical Midwestern stubbornness, the Big Ten has finally agreed to allow a playoff.  This should help consolidate the bowl schedule, which currently spreads out well beyond New Year's Day through a week-long minefield of games between mid-major type conferences (and in more than one country!) to get to a National Championship game played a month after the regular season.  That's a good thing.

The other development is more interesting, because it comes from the marketing side of the event.  The Football Bowl Association has joined up with Fishbait Marketing to sell corporate sponsorships across 33 of the 35 bowl games.  The two parties will target 30 different sponsorship categories, from auto parts to insurance to credit cards to home improvement stores, to market through all of the bowls in-game, stadium and non-broadcast media assets.

What this means is that now a corporate sponsor can easily create a national strategy for its brand.  Previously, a corporate sponsor had to reach out to each individual bowl to make its investment.  That was time-consuming and all but impossible to assemble.  Now a sponsor can purchase assets and reach a national audience on a consistent basis with one purchase.  That development means that previously unsold assets in second and third-tier bowl games  will be an added injection of revenue to the process. It's a model that has been tried and proven in tour golf and racing.

How does this help the audience build on New Year's Day?   It means that there is more money in the Bowl system, which means that the last conferences holding out for the riches of the old system have had their revenues replaced and then some.  That in turn means that they can re-engineer the schedule to create one final championship game, and one other day -- New Year's Day -- that the sport can again completely own.

It's a fairy tale ending a long time coming, that will allow college football and its fans to live happily ever after.