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Bowl musings - fullmetal - 08-19-2010

In order of priority, the top three bowls for Stanford this year are:

1) BCS championship
2) Rose Bowl

and

3) Alamo Bowl.

Yeah, I missed that too.  The Holiday Bowl was punted to the Pac-10 #3 spot (vs. Big-12 #5), and the newly-responsored Hyundai Sun Bowl picks fourth from the Pac-10 (vs. ACC #4).  The Alamo Bowl is looking at about a $3 million payout to each team, and they\'re strongly suggesting that they\'ll pick whichever team can travel best.  Of course, I don\'t know if they\'d break rankings too much to pick a well-traveling team, but should Stanford not make it to the top two bowl games listed above, let\'s hope half of Houston intends to descend upon San Antonio to see native son Andrew Luck carve up the Big-12 #3 pick.

Luckily enough, Stanford women\'s basketball fans have paved the way in determining the best way to experience Stanford sports at the Alamodome in downtown San Antonio.  

The dome, by the way, holds a nominal max capacity of 65,000 seats, and the bowl committee claims that 10k-12k tickets are purchased each year by local residents.  They\'re expecting whichever schools they select to sell an allotment of 9,500 tickets each.  That\'s kind of a high number for Stanford, isn\'t it?  How many did we sell for the Sun Bowl, and how many were we given?

This is all speculation given that bowls don\'t pick until about Dec. 6th, but there\'s apparently a large amount of planning that will need to happen between bowl committees and every possible candidate school in order to ensure smooth event execution in the three weeks between Dec. 6th and about the end of December.

Re: Bowl musings - Farm93 - 08-19-2010

Where have you been?  This has been known for months!

Assume for the moment that no Pac-10 team goes to the BCS.
And assume that the preseason hype has correctly called that OSU, Oregon and USC are a cut above the 4-8 crowd.  That would mean that the fourth place finisher would get a trip to the Holiday Bowl.   Pretty sweet!

Last year the Sun Bowl sold out, but that had A LOT to do with Oklahoma.  I would guess that the worst case scenario for the Pac-10 and the Alamo Bowl is for Stanford to be the first Pac-10 team in the game.  It is a pure numbers game.  Stanford has the smallest alumni base and very few non-alums willing to travel more than 20 miles to see a game.

I suspect the fear was that every Pac-10 school would not travel well, but that the local football loving crowd will pack the house anyway.  (The game means a lot to San Antonio)  The quality of Pac-10 play, and the opportunity to land a #2 team, likely ranked in the top 10-15, were likely the Pac-10 selling points.  Utah and Colorado likely would travel in numbers to San Antonio, but that is a different story.

I can only guess how the possibility of expansion helped land the San Antonio deal.  

Re: Bowl musings - calumnus - 08-20-2010

Quote:I would guess that the worst case scenario for the Pac-10 and the Alamo Bowl is for Stanford to be the first Pac-10 team in the game.
 

Cal played in the very first Alamo Bowl (1993) beating Iowa 37-3.
http://www.valeroalamobowl.com/main/bowl_history_detail.php?uid=1

WSU played in the second. San Antonio is a good destination, but attendance is definitely better when a Texas team is one of the participants.


Re: Bowl musings - Farm93 - 08-22-2010

That 1993 Alamo Bowl has very little in common with today\'s Alamo Bowl.  San Antonio was an upstart back then, but thanks to some lucky breaks the Alamo bowl zipped right on over the fine folks that run Holiday, Citrus, Independence, etc.  

And back in the early 90s each team was more or less on their own to land a gig.  Now, the conference and the conference brand are on the line, so this will be the first Alamo Bowl for the Pac-10 as part of the Pac-10\'s Alamo Bowl deal.