RIP, Little Caesars Pizza Bowl (2009-13). You are missed. (credit)

Gather ‘round, children. I used to be a fairly well-regarded sports business journalist, so I’m going to explain why college football bowl games have such stupid fucking names.

It’s actually simple: money.

The origin story is that almost 40 years ago, the TV networks and the bowls needed more money to offset the growing costs of hosting and broadcasting the games. And corporate America was eager to write checks.

Why do companies, from the traditional blue-blood corporations to obscure defense contractors, snack foods, and regional construction firms, want to spend substantial sums to slap their names on post-season college football games on ESPN?

Sometimes, it’s just part of their corporate DNA. And the famous old bowls — the Rose, Orange, Cotton, and Sugar bowls — are rooted in local civic pride, industry, and tourism.

Today, bowl sponsorships also are deemed useful for introducing new products and services, and for smaller and new companies, they do it for increased brand-name recognition. They want to sell more stuff, so having their name relentlessly in front of you is a tactic to do that. Spending a few million bucks gets you not only national television airtime but other media mentions that put the name in front of millions of people in print, online, in ads, and on-air mentions before and after the actual game. I am mentioning some of them in this essay, which is a form of free media. Also, at the games themselves, they stage “brand activations” to peddle their wares to fans.

Overall, the thinking goes like this: You’re not gonna change car insurance providers during the Sugar Bowl, but whenever you do, you may remember the “Allstate Sugar Bowl.” It’s why they typically have a full suite of commercials and other marketing shit all season.

December also is a shitty TV month. Everything is on hiatus, “Elf” is tiresomely airing 24/7, and weekday daytime television is dreadful, so people are willing to watch third-tier college football games. People are off of work, and bowl games are a good way to not have to talk to family. And now you can drink and bet on the bowl game right from the comfort of your own couch, you fucking degenerate.

The modern corporate bowl game name phenomenon was born in 1986 when Bob Iger, then an ABC Sports veep and today the god-emperor of Disney, told Sugar Bowl officials that the broadcast costs were too expensive. So, the bowl game sold a five-year, $10 million naming rights deal (quaint!) to Baltimore-based insurer USF&G, which in turn agreed to buy commercial airtime during the game. ABC also reduced its broadcast rights payment to the bowl — networks have been getting away with pleading poverty for a long time.

The season also gave us the “John Hancock Sun Bowl” and the “Sunkist Fiesta Bowl.”

Those three marketing deals birthed the tidal wave of increasingly silly bowl sponsorship names we see today, and it won’t be cresting any time soon. Fast-forward nearly 40 years, and shit’s gotten weird.

Imagine trying to explain to Woody Hayes or Bo Schembechler that the “Art of Sport LA Bowl Hosted by Gronk” is a bowl game between Cal and UNLV on Dec. 18.

They’d probably punch you.

Also, I now have to explain what the fuck the “Art of Sport LA Bowl Hosted by Gronk” game is to you, and I get it if you want to punch me. I want to punch myself. Fuck you, Bob Iger.

The game, played at L.A.’s SoFi Stadium (built for almost $6 billion – another fact that would make Woody and Bo lose their shit), began in 2021 as the “Jimmy Kimmel LA Bowl” which also would get you beaten by a very confused and angry pair of long-dead irascible Big Ten coaches.

In 2023, the bowl inked a sponsorship deal with popular retired tight end and professional meathead Rob Gronkowski. Then another with Santa Monica-based Starco Brands Inc., which as far as I can tell exists to create and market products with celebrity names attached. In the case of the bowl game, the name stems from the late Kobe Bryant’s athlete-aimed body care brand Art of Sport.

At least Cal is a local team, and UNLV is only four hours away. Bo and Woody would get that. But then you have to explain that Cal is now in the Atlantic Coast Conference. And for fun, tell them that their beloved Big Ten now includes UCLA, USC, Oregon, Washington, Maryland, Rutgers, and Nebraska. They’d murder you.

“Art of Sport LA Bowl Hosted by Gronk” isn’t even the wildest or longest bowl name this season. On Dec. 28, we get Miami of Ohio and Colorado State squaring off in the “Snoop Dogg Arizona Bowl Presented by Gin & Juice By Dre and Snoop.”

Listen, I love Snoop and Dre. They have earned their places as icons of the culture. I have a Snoop elf smoking a joint on the mantel. Them partnering to sell premade gin and juice canned cocktails makes sense. But holy shit “Snoop Dogg Arizona Bowl Presented by Gin & Juice By Dre and Snoop” is a goddamn mouthful. Woody and Bo would have really unpleasant things to say about that name, so it’s good they’re dead, I guess.

Older fans will remember classics such as the “Poulan Weed Eaters Independence Bowl” that’s perhaps the granddaddy of them all when it comes to strange, unnatural bowl game sponsorships. That deal between the Shreveport, La.-based bowl and the local outdoor power equipment maker (owned today by Sweden’s Husqvarna) lasted from 1990-97.

“Poulan Weed Eaters Independence Bowl” was a helluva name and is fondly remembered by many (me) as the charmingly innocent and stupid true beginning of dumb corporate names on bowl games.

What followed Poulan was a goofy-ass list of Independence Bowl replacement sponsors. The first was Sanford, which made Sharpie pens, then MainStay Funds (now part of New York Life), PetroSun, AdvoCare, Duck Commander, Camping World, Walk-On’s, and now Radiance Technologies.

What is Radiance Technologies? A Huntsville, Ala.-based cybersecurity contractor for the Pentagon and others. Which explains why Army is playing in it on Dec. 28 against Marshall. It’s part of the slate of games connected to the military-industrial complex that includes the “IS4S Salute to Veterans Bowl” (IS4S is Integrated Solutions for Systems Inc., a military contractor based in Huntsville); the “Lockheed Martin Armed Forces Bowl” (Oklahoma vs. Navy, Dec. 27); and the “Go Bowling Military Bowl” (East Carolina vs. NC State, Dec. 28).

If there’s anything this country loves as much as football and war, it’s food. And that’s why we have bowls named for Pop-Tarts, Reese’s, Cheez-Its, Chick-Fil-A, Duke’s Mayo, Tony the Tiger, Scooter’s Coffee, Famous Idaho’s Potatoes, and Kinder’s BBQ sauce.

One food-named bowl isn’t exactly named specifically for a food. The Fenway Bowl on Dec. 28 between UConn and North Carolina is the “Wasabi Fenway Bowl” but it’s for Boston-based Wasabi Technologies, a cloud storage firm whose founder apparently enjoyed the Japanese horseradish. Is that charming or stupid? Both? Yes.

At least the company is local to Fenway Park; a lot of bowl sponsors have zero connection to the stadium’s city. So why pay a bunch of money to slap your company name on a game far from your HQ? Limited inventory. There are only so many college bowl games available for naming rights in a given year, so you take what you can get. And if your goal is to get in front of millions of people, bowl broadcasts do that: Last season, the ESPN-broadcast bowls (which is almost all of them, and a lot of them the network owns outright) averaged 4.6 million viewers, absolutely massive viewership for December. The geographic connections don’t matter if you want eyeball counts.

Do the companies buying bowl naming rights get what they want? It’s hard to say because each has its own success metrics. Some are long-term deals, and others are one-shots. They typically do not share their ROI results, whether it’s moving widgets or getting a certain dollar amount worth of exposure. It can be difficult to quantify, especially when it’s executive ego in play.

We’ll end this diatribe with my personal favorite, just ten minutes down Interstate 75 from me.

That’s right, the “GameAbove Sports Bowl” in Detroit.

What the fuck is the GameAbove Sports Bowl? I am glad you didn’t actually ask. Its roots can be traced to the “Motor City Bowl” that was first played at the Pontiac Silverdome in 1997, and later moved to Ford Field. It was played under that name until 2009 amid the various financial meltdowns. That’s when it became the “Little Caesars Pizza Bowl” which didn’t actually sell its pizza at the game.

That awesome and short name lasted through 2013 when the game was mothballed. The next year, Ford Motor Co., whose name is on the stadium and which was founded by and is owned by the Ford family whose Detroit Lions are Ford Field’s home NFL team, created a bowl game as the de facto successor to the Pizza Bowl. They slapped their FoMoCo dealership in-house auto garage name on it, calling it the “Quick Lane Bowl.” The game technically is owned by the Lions.

Fun fact: Recently released Giants quarterback Daniel Jones was the MVP of the 2017 Quick Lane Bowl when Duke beat Northern Illinois 36-14 in front of 20,211 fans.

Attendance has never been great for the bowl. It has averaged just under 26,000 fans. The Pizza/Motor City Bowl averaged 43,583.

The bowl’s Quick Lane sponsorship, oddly, ended after last season. Now, sports business investment entity GameAbove Sports has taken over the bowl’s sponsorship. It’s made significant philanthropic donations, traditional business and media investments, and recently hired ex-Detroit Tigers play-by-play announcer Matt Shepard as its CEO. Or at least that’s what a bunch of press releases say, because I cannot quite discern what this company does.

Anyway, Toledo and Pitt play in the bowl at 2 p.m. on Boxing Day (Dec. 26). What else are you gonna do on the day after Christmas in the middle of the afternoon? Talk to you family? No. You’re gonna get drunk and watch a pair of 7-5 teams play mediocre football in frozen Detroit. And you’re gonna mildly enjoy it, and probably not give a shit about whatever GameAbove Sports is.

Here’s my 2024 top ten worst college bowl names:

1. Art of Sport L.A. Bowl Hosted By Gronk
2. Bad Boy Mowers Pinstripe Bowl
3. 68 Ventures Bowl
4. Snoop Dogg Arizona Bowl Presented by Gin & Juice By Dre and Snoop
5. Union Home Mortgage Gasparilla Bowl
6. Go Bowling Military Bowl
7. Taxslayer Gator Bowl
8. StaffDNA Cure Bowl
9. R+L Carriers New Orleans Bowl
10. Iselta New Mexico Bowl

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