College football bowl thread: Days of Signs and Roses

I just did the “catch up via key plays” thing for the Boca Raton Bowl. This is like the football equivalent of Faces of Death. Does Syracuse have any players on scholarship?

Also how great a scam is it to finish 11th in your conference and chill in Palm Beach County for a week while teams ahead of you in the standings are shivering in garden spots like Birmingham, Charlotte, Annapolis and the Bronx?

 

Track Mile High's officiating schedule next fall!

 

Has this all been mentioned? Pac-12 finalizes divorce agreement. Wazzu and Oregon State keep the house, the kids and the assets - the departing 10 agree to cover medical insurance. Wazzu and the Beavs essentially get about three years of media rights deal money in the settlement. It's not Big 10 money, but it is close to SEC money. Big 12 and ACC money if you stretch it out to four years. It again speaks to the outright incompetence and neglect of the school leadership of the departing schools.
You fail to protect your brand and conference, you are forced into shotgun marriages in conferences and make all of your student athletes (haha) spend more time off campus to travel to other time zones. How any of these board of trustees can still show their faces in public is beyond me.

Oregon State, Washington State reach Pac-12 settlement with departing schools

 

Washington State with all this money is going to end up on one of those TLC shows of lottery winners who blow it all in five years.

 

Financials from Canzano:

• The 10 departing schools don’t have “exit fees” but they’ve agreed to pay WSU and OSU a combined $65 million on the way out the door. Some of those payments will be withheld from revenue earned by the conference this fiscal year. A second round of payments will be made to WSU/OSU in 2024-25, I’m told.

Why the deferred payments?

Some of the departing schools insist they don’t have the cash and need to defer payments until after they begin receiving media-rights payments from their new conferences.

• Quick math tells us that OSU and WSU will have a war chest with $255 million available to live off in the next few years and rebuild the Pac-12. The NCAA allows a grace period that will allow the Pac-12 to exist as a two-team conference for at least the next two years. The conference will need to rebuild to at least eight teams by the end of the 2025-26 academic year.

 

A grace period to rebuild the PAC sounds so much more cheerful than “we’re going to blow up the Mountain West instead of telling the Cougs and Beavers to join and leave it intact.”

 

They saw Ohtani's contract and thought it was a good idea.

 

Gonna be a beautiful day for the Birmingham Bowl. 50ish and sunny, going to the high 60's.

 

Advertising Birmingham Bowl tickets 60 seconds before the Birmingham Bowl broadcast begins on the same radio station is certainly a choice.

 

The Birmingham Bowl is the soundtrack to my post brunch nap.

 

I've always wondered with a lot of these bowls - some of the most interesting points of interest - particularly in the South - are Civil Rights Trail and Civil War battle sites. I wonder how much the bowl organizers show them off to to the teams.
If you have a beach - your entertainment plan is set. But I wonder what you do in say Charlotte, or Frisco, Texas. Houston? At least the Alamo Bowl has the Alamo. Do they let the teams go over the border at the Sun Bowl?

 

Birmingham Bowl has been pretty consistent about having teams tour the Civil Rights Institute. And Top Golf is across the street from the stadium so I’m sure that gets in the mix now.