COLLEGE FOOTBALL: THE BOWL GAMES : Today’s Bowls Are Games of High Stakes, Survival

To sponsor a successful big-time college postseason bowl game, these are necessities:

--A huge television contract.

--A locale that includes either sun, sand, surf or Bourbon Street.

--New Year’s Day.

--A huge title sponsorship contract with an insurance company or something to do with fruit.

But a low-rent bowl game? Try these:

--A bare-bones contract with a regional TV syndicator; two tin cans and ton of string.

--A locale in close proximity to a state prison and perhaps a Civil War museum; rain.

--Not New Year’s Day.

--A band of zealous locals willing to shell out tens of dollars to bring hundreds of football fans to their burg.

In the business of college bowl games, the financial stakes are higher than ever and the competition is fierce. If it sounds like a television game show, you are getting warm. For television is the operative word in today’s bowl picture.

Television has served as the spaceship that has propelled postseason bowl games to the stratosphere of sports-bucks sweepstakes. Consider that NBC-TV is spending $17 million in rights fees for its three New Year’s Day games this season, including $11 million for the Rose Bowl.

Television has attracted sponsors to the bowls in a big way. Corporations like college football and its autumn-leaves tradition, wholesome image (cough, cough) and, significantly, the well-heeled alumni who follow their teams to the ends of the earth, or at least to Shreveport, La.

To capitalize on this audience, corporate America is buying into college football. The U.S. Fidelity and Guaranty Insurance Co. shelled out $2 million so a football game can be called the USF&G; Sugar Bowl. Talk about a sweet deal. Sunkist juiced up the Fiesta Bowl for $1 million. John Hancock signed on to the Sun Bowl for $400,000. Sea World swam into the Holiday Bowl picture for $250,000.

Deep pockets sponsors are great for the big bowls, but how in the heck do the little bowls do it? How do you do it if you don’t have TV money and you’ve got just a local Chevy dealership and the Kiwanis kicking in a few thousand? The not-so-easy answer from around the country is, “It’s tough, but we manage.”

“We survive very carefully,” said Tom Starr, executive director of the Freedom Bowl. “The bowl business has changed drastically in the last five years. Twelve to 15 years ago, the ratings were so high for all sports. You just didn’t have as many choices. Now, that pie has been split. For us, you have to look for alternative sources of revenue. I guess title sponsorship is the way we are going.”

The Freedom Bowl is one of the new bowls, having learned from the mistakes and failures of others. The bowl of longstanding respect, among the also-rans, is the Liberty Bowl. After 29 years in the bowl business, they’ve got it down cold.

“It’s not easy,” said A.F. (Bud) Dudley, executive director of the Liberty Bowl. How does his bowl survive? “It’s a question of getting a better television contract than everybody else. Early in the game, we realized the networks weren’t paying the money we wanted. We were one of the first to switch over to the syndicators.”

The Liberty Bowl is shown on Raycom, where it was broadcast to 80% of the country last year and had a 6.8 rating, according to a network spokesman. What Dudley and other bowl directors can expect is less television money--as much as 40% less in rights fees in the future.

Mike Cohen, who formerly handled public relations for Mizlou, a syndicator, and is an expert in the business of independent television, said rights fees will fall drastically. “Everyone knows that the Rose Bowl (whose contract runs out in 1990) is going to go to one-third or less,” he said. That will force the bowls to seek money elsewhere, advertising for one. “Advertising for syndicated games really can’t support you,” Cohen said. “It doesn’t make sense to make a tiny profit for the prestige of having a bowl game. Prestige doesn’t pay bills.”

This is all very, very bad news for the small bowls. Like the animals on Orwell’s farm, some bowls are more equal than others. The big five--the Rose, the Sugar, the Orange, the Cotton and the Fiesta--are not going to feel too much pain because of less television money. They’ll get more from corporations. The small bowls, however, are scrambling to compete.

They are the Loser Bowls. Clues to these are in the way the prospective matchups are printed: For example, Independence Bowl--loser of Arkansas-Mississippi and loser of Texas Tech-Southern Mississippi.

Some of these small bowls are considered to be the game of last resort. It is offered to a team as a consolation for missing the bowl they really wanted.

Some teams don’t want to go to bowls. Some bowls. West Virginia players were irate in 1983 when school administrators chose to go to the Hall of Fame Bowl over the Citrus (exam conflicts) and Peach (they played there in 1981). The team did not want to go.

More shocking was Notre Dame’s acceptance of the Liberty Bowl bid in 1983 when the team was 6-5. That decision came after a heated team meeting in which many players thought the team didn’t deserve to go to a bowl game. They argued that to go to a bowl game would cheapen the Notre Dame tradition. Also, a loss in a crummy bowl would blow tradition out the window.

The Fighting Irish salvaged the season by beating Boston College, 19-18, in a game highlighted by 10-degree weather and 15 m.p.h. winds. The Hall of Fame Bowl, now called the All-American Bowl, has had its snubs. In the year that West Virginia’s team didn’t want to go, it turns out their fans didn’t, either. The university returned 7,500 of its allotted 12,500 tickets for the game against Kentucky, saying it couldn’t give tickets away.

West Virginia had traditionally brought a large following on its bowl trips, but there was seemingly something about the thought of Birmingham in December that didn’t thrill the Mountaineer fans, even though West Virginia in December isn’t Waikiki Beach, either.

Only 500 tickets were sold in the first week. Yet the season before, West Virginia fans grabbed up 21,000 tickets to the Gator Bowl. That time, with the thought of Florida on New Year’s Eve dancing in their heads, Mountaineer fans bought 12,000 tickets in the first eight hours.

It was a rough year for the Hall of Fame Bowl 1983. The other team, Kentucky, sold only 5,000 tickets. In 1976, the last time the Wildcats were in a bowl, 37,000 fans followed them to the Peach Bowl in Atlanta.

The Independence Bowl was placed on probation in 1984 for not meeting local ticket-sale requirements. A National Collegiate Athletic Assn. bylaw requires 40% of the stadium’s capacity to be sold in the host city. The bowl missed the mark by 756 tickets.

This is the problem faced by the Birminghams, the Shreveports, the El Pasos, et al of the bowl circuit. Who wants to go there?

One thing the smaller bowls sell is atmosphere.

“There’s people who really don’t have to do a lot of selling,” Dudley said. “Phoenix (site of the Fiesta Bowl) is a place people will want to go in December. Same with the bowls in Florida. We don’t have sand and sun. We’ve kicked off when it’s 62 degrees and we’ve kicked off when it’s 32 degrees.

“We don’t allow the team to sit around. We do a lot of parties and entertaining. These other bowls can just set them loose on the beach.”

What Dudley, in his self-effacing manner, has failed to mention, is Memphis’ trump card., which it paraded around a few years ago. Not Elvis Presley’s mansion, but a former resident--Cybill Shepherd. That helps recruiting.

In Shreveport at the Independence Bowl, they regale visiting teams with pep rallies, parades and fish fries. It’s all very low key. Much like the teams they attract.

“The players here have a lot of fun,” said Paul Manasseh, executive director of the Independence Bowl. “These teams don’t have a lot of pressure on them. That’s the nice thing about our game. They (coaches) let them pretty much do what they want. The kids have a good time.”

They keep the players so busy they don’t realize they are in Shreveport.

New bowls on the block have a rough time. In the ‘50s, when the Tangerine Bowl was a few years old and struggling (and before it threw its lot in with the rest of the peelable fruit and became the Florida Citrus Bowl), publicists were not above approaching writers from national newspapers and begging for stories. Shirley Povich of the Washington Post was asked by the Tangerine Bowl’s public relations guy to write about that year’s contest. “Who’s in it?” Povich asked. “Well,” said the publicist proudly, “We’ve got Emory & Henry all sewed up, and West Chester State is nibbling.”

Oh.

And whatever became of the Fellowship Bowl? The bowl, which was to be held in the Hoosier Dome in Indianapolis, after gaining certification from the NCAA last year. So sure was the Epsilon Sigma Alpha Foundation that its bowl would become reality, that the co-chairwoman of the ESA was saying this two years ago: “From the feedback we get, unless we fall on our face, the Dome falls down or a national disaster takes place, we’re going to be certified.”

Oops. The Dome didn’t fall and, while there have been some problems, there were no national disasters, but the people of Epsilon Sigma Alpha are still waiting.

But this is the way of bowls. What about the Hula Bowl? What about the Cherry Bowl? It’s inaugural game in 1984 in the Silverdome in Pontiac, Mich., ranked fourth in attendance and sixth in payoff. The first Cherry Bowl was quite successful. The Cherry Bowl, however, fell into the pits two years later.

Why? Let’s hear again from the people at ESA, who were so smart they hired Tom Martin, the former president of the defunct Cherry Bowl, to run their bowl campaign.

“People think it’s a given to have a bowl game you have to have seashore, sunshine, warm breezes, and, I suppose, bikinis,” Martin said. “People ask what attractions Indianapolis has. Well, what attractions do El Paso, Tex., and Shreveport, La., have?”

What attractions, indeed.

Not to dwell on Shreveport, but the city’s biggest attraction, its race track, Louisiana Downs, is closed while the bowl is in town. Teams can go and look through the gates. That leaves Barksdale Air Force Base for major tour activities.

Take the Sun Bowl. This is the bowl that Florida State Coach Bill Peterson said he liked because he could go across the border to Warsaw. He meant Juarez.

The Sun Bowl might overcompensate for its dullness by excessively rowdy, very Western, activities organized for the players. This is the bowl where, as part of the festivities, a busload of Tennessee football players were hijacked on their way to a horse ranch.

So successful was that zany gag that they tried it again with the Maryland team. They took three players from the team bus and shoved them into the back of a pickup truck. The local police played along by chasing the truck with sirens wailing.

“They had us fooled for a while,” the Maryland sports information director said. “And a little scared.”

The Citrus Bowl has Disney World, Sea World, Circus World, and a few years ago, this halftime show: The Dallas Cowboy cheerleaders, the Golden Girls and the Dixie Darlings.

These days small bowls need more than dancing girls, free food, shirts, ties, jackets, watches, key chains and seat cushions to attract teams, and money. More and more, the smaller bowls are diversifying.

The Freedom Bowl is catching on to the “festival” concept by sponsoring a Freedom Bowl high school band tournament and a Freedom Bowl golf tournament. The income from these events may be marginal, but the name recognition is the payoff. It’s small to start with, but it’s the kind of thing the other bowls will have to do to stay in the business.

Not that the big bowls will care if the Bluebonnet Bowls bites it. But they remain feisty, that’s their salvation.

“We know who we are, we cannot compete with the big boys,” Starr of the Freedom Bowl said. “But we think we can compete with anyone else. When a team is from the Midwest, and somebody is paying out $800,000 and we pay out $500,00, they know they can get a better trip here. It will actually be cheaper. We have battled for some teams we have no business battling for. We’ll get them.”

PROJECTED PAYOUTS OF BOWL GAMES WHAT EACH SCHOOL GETS FOR PLAYING.

Bowl Site Payout Bluebonnet Houston $500,000 Cotton Dallas $2.2 million Fiesta Tempe, Ariz. $2 million Fla. Citrus Orlando $1.5 million Freedom Anaheim $500,000 Gator Jacksonville, Fla. $1 million Hall of Fame Tampa, Fla. $800,000 Holiday San Diego $750,000 Liberty Memphis $1 million Orange Miami $2.4 million Peach Atlanta $800,000 Rose Pasadena $6 million* Sugar New Orleans $2.65 million

* Big Ten and Pacific 10 conferences each get $6 million