Gator Bowl officials took heat earlier this month for announcing interest in Florida State and West Virginia in spite of those teams not necessarily deserving a spot in the bowl at the time.
It’s not just the Gator Bowl, though.
As the country tries to nurse the slowly recovering economy, bowl officials are becoming increasingly forced to make tough decisions.
With ticket sales as the main revenue source for bowls, there has been an emphasis in selecting bowl matchups that are "sure bets," said Gator Bowl Selection Committee Chairman Brian Goin.
"Right now you will see even the BCS bowls trying to find out what to do," he said after selecting West Virginia to play in the Gator Bowl.
Last year, BCS bowls had the worst collective attendance year in more than 10 years.
Only the BCS National Championship Game and the Tostitos Fiesta Bowl had improved attendance from the previous year’s games.
The FedEx Orange Bowl filled 96.2 percent of the seats in Land Shark Stadium, but it was the lowest total since 2000.
A total of 93,293 fans saw last season’s Rose Bowl game presented by Citi between USC and Penn State. It was the smallest crowd since the last time a non-Big 10 Conference or Pac 10 Conference team played in the game in 2003 when Oklahoma faced Washington State.
The Sugar Bowl selected a non-BCS team Utah to face Alabama – and saw a drop in attendance. A total of 71,872 fans saw the game in person – the lowest total since 2001. Even the 2005 Sugar Bowl, which was moved to the Georgia Dome because of Hurricane Katrina, had higher attendance.
Other bowls have seen struggles, as well.
Nine of the 34 bowls last year had less than 75 percent of the seats filled. The R+L Carriers New Orleans Bowl had just 41.4 percent of seats in the Superdome filled – the lowest of the bowls.
It’s good for WVU
Last season, the Gator Bowl chose Nebraska and Clemson – two teams with fan bases that historically travel well – and 67,205 showed up. There were 30 crowds larger than the 2009 game in the bowl’s history, though.
In fact, the bowl game hasn’t recorded a crowd of more than 78,000 since 2004 when Maryland faced West Virginia.
This season, to try to sell more tickets, the bowl had to make some tough decisions.
"West Virginia’s football program is a nation. They are passionate about WVU football and they follow, and that clearly makes it exciting from our standpoint," Goin said.
West Virginia fans have historically traveled well to the Gator Bowl. The Mountaineers played in the 1989 Gator Bowl, which broke the bowl’s attendance record that still stands today.
The Mountaineers have played in three of the top 10 attendance games in the game’s history.
"It’s no fun to run a bowl game and have nobody in the stands, so we work all year long, and that’s what you want. It’s like having a party and nobody comes," Goin said. "We know that West Virginia will deliver to that party."
Russ Sharp said despite the highly regarded fan base, the athletic department does try to politic for better bowls.
He did admit, though, WVU has to do less of that compared to other Big East Conference teams because of the program’s perception.
"It’s not some urban myth, it’s a hard number. Our fans travel," Sharp said. "You can go to Charlotte or go to the Gator Bowl and there’s a lot of gold, and people see that. The people that run those bowls see that.
"We are sought after in that regard, and that’s a testament to having a successful football program over the years and having a very, very, very loyal fan base."
It’s bad for WVU, too
The Big East has reworked its bowl affiliation for next season. The conference loses its ties with the Gator Bowl and Sun Bowl.
In its place, the conference worked in new agreements with the Champs Sports Bowl in Orlando, Fla., for its second-place team and the newly-formed Yankee Bowl for its fourth-place team.
Those two bowls are expected to be in a better geographical area for Big East fans to travel. Still, the Champs Sports Bowl and the Yankee Bowl are not as highly regarded as the two the Big East lost for 2010.
The Big East collectively had a bad representation at bowls last season. Three of the bottom nine bowls in attendance percentage last year had Big East ties. Only one of those nine bowls, the Insight Bowl, had neither a Big East or non-BCS team.
West Virginia did not struggle last year, however, as the Meineke Car Care Bowl had a record-breaking, sell-out crowd.
Sharp said WVU is hurt by the fact other Big East teams are not as strong of travelers.
"It’s one of those things where everyone has to step up to the plate and try to make it as positive as they can," he said. "That takes work on the part of everybody. That’s something that conference works at all the time, and they know how important that is."
Is it necessary?
For bowls in greater financial trouble, it becomes less about the matchups on the field and more about what matchups will sell more tickets, Goin said.
The Gator Bowl was worried about how Cincinnati would travel to Jacksonville, Fla., had it lost to Pittsburgh in the de-facto Big East Championship game last weekend. It also wanted to stay away from a team like Boston College because its fans would likely have to fly to the game while a team like Clemson or Georgia Tech could either drive or fly.
"We want to know that in this economy you’re going to have a group that’s going to come with you," Goin said.
In addition, bowls oftentimes stay away from teams who lost in a championship game because a loss could hurt attendance, Goin said.
Is it right?
While it might not be the purest way to matchup teams, the BCS and bowl systems aren’t particularly pure themselves, said Coyte Cooper, an assistant professor in the sports administration program at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill.
"It is for those making the decisions at the bowl games, solely about making money," Cooper said, who taught economics and finance at WVU to undergraduates and graduates at the College of Physical Activity and Sport Sciences last year.
"For the schools, it’s also about making money, so I don’t know if it’s necessarily fair that they jump, but I completely understand why the teams and the bowl games, especially in this economy, want to have situations that make sense," he added.
Cooper said the economy hasn’t yet affected attendance for historically strong programs. Most of those programs continue to bring just as many fans to home games. What the economy will change first are postseason bowls and tournaments.
"I’m not sure what the right solution is," he said. "But I think what you will see in the future, if the economy stays like this, is selection committees trying to keep teams close, so fans will travel really well."
Perhaps the 2010 bowl season might be the first example of the economy sneaking up on college sports.
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