Business Blog: Hoover’s Business Insight Zone

I have, at times, found myself watching the XCorp.com Grape Bowl¹ and wondering this: “What the heck does XCorp.com even do, and why do they feel the need to sponsor the Grape Bowl?” To help other college football fans facing the same predicament, I offer this handy cheat sheet of this season’s bowl games, with links to Hoover’s records on sponsors.

• San Diego County Credit Union Poinsettia Bowl² — December 20 — Utah beat Navy, 35-32
• R+L Carriers New Orleans Bowl — December 21 — Florida Atlantic beat Memphis, 44-27
• Papajohns.com Bowl — December 22 — Cincinnati beat Southern Miss, 31-21.
• New Mexico Bowl³ — December 22 — New Mexico shut out Nevada, 23-0.
• Pioneer Las Vegas Bowl — December 22 — BYU edged out UCLA, 17-16.
• Sheraton Hawaii Bowl — December 23 — East Carolina pulled off the upset over Boise State, 41-38
• Motor City Bowl — December 26 — Purdue barely beat Central Michigan in a shootout, 51-48
• Pacific Life Holiday Bowl — December 27 — Texas⁴ beat Arizona State, 52-34. It might not have been pretty, but I’ll take it.
• Champs Sports Bowl — December 28 — Boston College beat Michigan State, 24-21.
• Texas Bowl — December 28 — TCU beat Houston, 20-13.
• Emerald Bowl — December 28 — Oregon State beat Maryland, 21-14.
• Meineke Car Care Bowl — December 29 — Wake Forest beat UConn, 24-10, in a matchup of basketball schools playing football.
• AutoZone Liberty Bowl — December 29 — Mississippi State beat the University of Central Florida, 10-3. Having grown up in West Texas, I love me a game dominated by defense.
• Valero Alamo Bowl — December 29 — Penn State beat Texas A&M, 24-17, in Joe Paterno’s 500th game coaching the Nittany Lions. Wow.
• PetroSun Independence Bowl — December 30 — Alabama beat Colorado, 30-24.
• Bell Helicopter Armed Forces Bowl — December 31 — California beat Air Force, 42-36.
• Roady’s Humanitarian Bowl — December 31 — Fresno State beat Georgia Tech, 40-28.
• Brut Sun Bowl — December 31 — Oregon whipped South Florida, 56-21.
• Gaylord Hotels Music City Bowl — December 31 — Kentucky beat Florida State, 35-28. My memories of FSU’s dominance and Kentucky’s irrelevance are so deeply ingrained that writing that feels weird.
• Insight Bowl — December 31 — Oklahoma State beat Indiana, 49-33. Another historic basketball matchup on the football field.
• Chick-fil-A Bowl — December 31 — Auburn beat Clemson, 23-20, in overtime.
• Outback Bowl — January 1 — Tennessee beat Wisconsin, 21-17.
• AT&T Cotton Bowl — January 1 — Missouri laid a whipping on Arkansas, 38-7.
• Konica Minolta Gator Bowl — January 1 — Texas Tech staged a furious comeback to squeak past Virginia, 31-28.
• Capital One Bowl — January 1 — Michigan beat Florida, 41-35, to erase some of the horrible memories of the Appalachian State loss early in the season and send off retiring Wolverines head coach Lloyd Carr with a win.
• Rose Bowl presented by⁵ Citi⁶ — January 1 — USC showed Illinois what it’s really like, running them all over the field in a 49-17 win.  I don’t especially like Pete Carroll, but give him credit:  his team comes loaded for bear every year.
• Allstate Sugar Bowl — January 1 — Georgia welcomed the upstart Hawaii Warriors to the world of big-time college football by spanking them 41-10.  (More to come on this in a later post.)
• Tostitos Fiesta Bowl — January 2 — Oklahoma vs. West Virginia
• FedEx Orange Bowl — January 3 — Virginia Tech vs. Kansas
• International Bowl⁷ — January 5 — Rutgers vs. Ball State
• GMAC Bowl — January 6 — Bowling Green vs. Tulsa
• Allstate BCS Championship Game⁸ — January 7 — LSU vs. Ohio State

If you’re interested in the actual, you know, football side of things, ESPN has a handy page with previews and recaps of all the bowl games.

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Footnotes:

1. That’s a name I made up right now, trying to pick something appropriately ridiculous. Now that I think about it, though, given the bewildering profusion of bowl games, there could well be an actual XCorp.com and an actual Grape Bowl. I’m almost afraid to look it up.

2. Why the San Diego County Credit Union wants to build its branding through a sponsorship that blasts its name out on national television is beyond me. But hey, maybe it makes them happy.

3. Given the broad variety of household and non-household names sponsoring bowls, it seems sad when a bowl can’t land any name-above-the-title sponsor.

4. My beloved alma mater has had a down year — or maybe I should say “down” year, since many schools would be thrilled with a 9-3 record and a trip to a bowl game. Hook ‘Em!

5. I look down on the whole “presented by” thing. It strikes me as an effort to distance oneself from the commercialism of the other bowls . . . yet it’s not like the Rose Bowl has turned down Citigroup’s lovely, lovely money.

6. I’m guessing Vikram Pandit will have good seats for this game. It’s good to be the chief.

7. I can deal with two forgettable 7-5 teams playing a bowl game in Toronto. But the purist in me absolutely shuns the idea of such a game being played after the Big Bowls (Sugar, Orange, Rose) are underway. Bear Bryant must be spinning in his grave.

8. The purist in me can also deal with the BCS system — flawed though it is — but I wish they could have the championship game as part of one of the BCS bowls. Okay, like football fans everywhere, what I really wish is that they could develop an 8- or 12-team playoff system that would use existing bowls (or new ones! the more the merrier!) to determine which team well and truly deserves the national title.