On bowl ratings and attendance

Seems as if every year a pro-BCS catch phrase is demolished.

We heard the regular season was a playoff until it was obvious that teams from lesser conferences were excluded from that playoff.

The "every game matters" line is now a punch line.

And in recent years, one of the main defenses of the flawed system was the enormous interest in it.

They need to come up with a different argument now that bowl attendance and ratings are slipping. Interesting article here by Brett McMurphy of CBSSports.com (same site, it should be noted, that told us Joe Paterno was dead before he died ... but that's another topic for another day).

A passage from McMurphy's piece:

Since the Bowl Championship Series added a fifth BCS bowl game -- the BCS national title game -- after the 2006 regular season, attendance at the BCS bowl games has been on a steady decline.

In 2005, the last season before the addition of that title game, the Fiesta, Orange, Rose and Sugar bowls had a total announced attendance of 319,936, averaging 79,984 per bowl. This past season the announced attendance for those four bowls had dropped to 293,247; an average of 73,311 per bowl.

While there was a slight increase in 2010, this year's attendance numbers were 8 percent lower than the 2005 figures.

And another excerpt:

Compounding matters for the BCS bowls is that not only are fewer fans attending their bowls, but TV ratings also are on the decline.

The 2011-12 bowl season averaged 5.2 million viewers for 34 telecasts on ABC, CBS, ESPN, ESPN2 and Fox, down 15 percent from the 6.1 million viewers last year, Sports Business Journal reported.

"The ratings clock starts clicking down the more you get away from the Rose Bowl," a bowl source said. "You lose the buzz of a bowl game the further you get away from New Year's Day unless you have some spectacular matchup."

McMurphy also notes that the Orange Bowl has suffered a 9.7-percent decrease in attendance since the 2005 season. This year's game between Clemson and West Virginia caught a lot of heat for poor attendance and poor ratings, but I actually thought the fan representation from both schools was pretty good.

The decrease in attendance might be more attributable to lack of interest from South Florida locals.

Here's what the matchups have looked like since Penn State beat Florida State in overtime after the 2005 season:

2006: Louisville-Wake Forest
2007: Kansas-Virginia Tech
2008: Virginia Tech-Cincinnati
2009: Iowa-Georgia Tech
2010: Stanford-Virginia Tech

Shoot, I'd have stayed home too instead of paying a bunch of money to watch some of those blah matchups.

Even those of us who despise the current system have to be fair in acknowledging the presence of factors beyond the BCS's control. The economy, plus the availability of every single game and the presence of HD TV and DVR and all that, are creating an impact that is worrisome.

The powers that be -- or the power that be (ESPN) -- doesn't care about the empty seats as long as the ratings are good. So no wonder we're hearing about major changes to the system at the first sign of decreased ratings.

LW