COLUMBIA AND THE STATE of South Carolina need to jump on the college football bowl game bandwagon. Following the lead of the New Mexico Bowl, South Carolina could inject income into the state's economy and gain unprecedented - and badly needed - positive national exposure.
Call it the Palmetto Bowl. Play it one or two days after New Year's Day. At a time when the nation knows the state only for Joe Wilson and Mark Sanford, what better way to promote its mountains, beaches and many things in between.
The trick to securing the Palmetto Bowl is to align with ESPN, garner the support of USC and hitch on with a national sponsor. The subject was broached several years ago, but ESPN was not in the business of owning bowl games then, and USC wanted no part of a postseason game at Williams Brice Stadium.
Times have changed.
"Columbia could definitely have a bowl, there is no question about it," says Eric Hyman, USC's director of athletics. "I'm amenable to anything that makes economic sense."
It helps that Hyman was the athletics director at TCU in 2003 when the Armed Forces Bowl got off the ground in Fort Worth, Texas. Hyman gave the bowl the backing of TCU and allowed the game to be played at the school's Carter Stadium.
The Armed Forces Bowl was one of the first to hook up with ESPN, and it secured a corporate sponsor in Bell Helicopter. The bowl has grown each year, and continues to be a moneymaker for ESPN and the two participating conferences, the Mountain West and Conference USA.
Hyman has seen it work first-hand, and believes the same could happen in Columbia.
A corporate sponsor could be difficult to secure in these difficult economic times. Yet of the six bowl games owned by ESPN, five have corporate sponsors, ranging from the Papajohns.com Bowl to the MAACO Bowl LasVegas.
The New Mexico Bowl has a dual sponsorship with the state department of Tourism and the Albuquerque Convention and Business Bureau. If you watched this year's game, you saw what amounted to a three-hour infomercial on the city of Albuquerque and the state of New Mexico.
South Carolina could fall back on the same sponsorships and use the perfect vehicle to let the country know there is more to this state than bad politics, poor education and the Confederate flag.
Such a game comes at a small price to USC and the city of Columbia. Volunteers from both factions generally manage the operation of the game, with the city providing police protection and perhaps the state of South Carolina managing traffic control.
Otherwise, the bowl game's success hinges on ESPN ownership. ESPN owns and operates the St. Petersburg Bowl in Florida, the Papajohns.com Bowl in Birmingham, the New Mexico Bowl in Albuquerque, the Las Vegas Bowl in Nevada, the Armed Forces Bowl in Fort Worth and the Hawaii Bowl in Honolulu.
By owning the bowl games, ESPN ensures the two elements that make for a successful game: financial stability and a national television audience. This is lucrative programming for ESPN, and the financial well-being of the game has little to do with attendance.
Here is how it works:
Using the Papajohns.com Bowl as an example, you can see how the game netted $800,000 before a single ticket was sold to the public. USC and Connecticut were required to purchase 10,000 tickets each with a face value per ticket of $40. If a school comes up short in selling those tickets, its conference purchases the remainder.
The bowl game announced a crowd of 45,254. Let's say 40,000 tickets were sold. That's a profit of $1.6 million, which would cover the guaranteed payout to both teams. USC was paid $900,000 as the representative from the SEC and Connecticut was paid $600,000 as the representative from the Big East.
On top of that, Papa John's Pizza pays in the neighborhood of $1 million to ESPN for the game's naming rights. ESPN also sells advertising for its televised games. Advertisers like the idea of seeing their product displayed in all six bowl games.
ESPN probably is not that concerned that there were only 2.5 million viewers for the Papajohns.com Bowl because more than 15 million watched all six of its games. That's the number ESPN sells to its advertisers.
In essence, the bowl games have become lucrative programming for ESPN.
"They have voids in their television programming," Hyman says of ESPN. "That's why you see some of their games after New Year's, and they get good ratings because the American population has such an insatiable appetite for football.
"It's about supply and demand, and the demand is out there. That's what drives it, the thirst that people have for college football."
That thirst could extend to Columbia. There is one major hitch to bringing the Palmetto Bowl to town. The Confederate flag. The flap over it would prevent a game from being played here.
Nevertheless, a bowl game could provide a grand opportunity. It would be the perfect chance for South Carolina to show the nation it is ready to move away from its sordid past and push forward in progressive ways.
At halftime of the first Palmetto Bowl, state officials could officially remove the flag from the Statehouse grounds, ceremoniously place it in a glass-enclosed case at midfield at Williams-Brice Stadium and permanently retire it to a state museum.
Everyone would come away a winner.
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