* No, the Outback Bowl will never host a national championship game, but it is among the top tier of bowls–of which there are, at 34, entirely too many. Moreover, no bowl game has a longer-tenured corporate sponsorship (1996) than the Outback, nor a longer-tenured president and CEO than the well-regarded Jim McVay. He’s been running the show here in Tampa since 1988.
But there’s something else about the Outback Bowl. It always matches teams with winning records, and it’s held in a venue that is a winter reward for teams and their fans.
Actually, there is something else too.
The Outback Bowl really sounds like a bowl game. As opposed to, say: The GoDaddy.com Bowl or the Famous Idaho Potato Bowl or the AdvoCare V100 Bowl, the Buffalo Wild Wings Bowl, the Chick-fil-A Bowl, the Little Caesars Pizza Bowl or–sorry, St. Pete–the Beef ‘O’ Brady’s Bowl.
The Outback Bowl doesn’t sound like a domain registrar, a marketing slogan, a distributor of skin care products or a bar and grill. If you can’t be the Cotton, Fiesta, Orange, Sugar or Rose Bowls, Outback is the one to be.
* For those still shaking their heads over that whole Jameis Winston affair at FSU, here’s a book you may want to pick up. It’s “The System: The Glory and Scandal of Big-Time College Football” by Jeff Benedict and Armen Keteyian. It covers the waterfront of issues from recruiting to tutoring to creatively providing “special benefits.” There are coeds, boosters, agents and variations on a “third party” theme–and victims.
Speaking of Tallahassee, here are a couple of national statistics that are as disturbing as they are unsurprising. They involve criminal complaints of felony assault attributed to college and pro athletes between 1986 and 1995. Two key findings:
1–A criminal complaint against a college or pro athlete for sexual assault is far more likely to result in arrest and in an indictment.
2–Athletes are significantly less likely to be convicted.
* After having lived for three years in Marietta (Cobb County), Ga., right outside of Atlanta, I totally get what’s behind the Atlanta Braves’ announced deal to relocate about 12 miles northwest of Turner Field (“The Ted”) in downtown to southern Cobb County.
Sure, the Braves, whose current lease runs out in 2016, found a suburban government willing to partially fund a proposed ($672 million) stadium. But it’s a lot more than that.
The Braves will also own property around the new stadium, which is ripe for commercial development. The area is affluent and mostly white. “The Ted,” the erstwhile Centennial Olympic Stadium that opened in 1997, is surrounded by parking lots and relatively poor people, who happen to be mostly black. “The Ted” might have been state of the art, but it never warranted a stop on Atlanta’s light rail (MARTA) system. That always spoke volumes. There’s not so much as a bank or a grocery store nearby.
This is an economic class issue with ironic racial overtones.
Atlanta, by marketing mantra, is “the city that’s too busy to hate.” It’s also fiercely proud of being home to the most prominent black middle class in America. Anything–from underachieving city schools to public housing issues to urban crime rates–that is at variance with that image is marginalized and papered over.
For baseball, the market is the suburbs. It’s where the money is. It’s where the fan base is. And it’s where economic opportunity–and the color green–beckons.
* Once again the National Hockey League, which is the least flush of the big four professional sports leagues, shows that its priorities are properly placed when it comes to the holidays. Christmas, says the NHL, is about families. Players as well as fans. Therefore, teams do not play or practice on Christmas Eve, Christmas Day or the day after Christmas.
In stark contrast is the National Basketball Association. It marketed no less than five nationally televised games–from noon through midnight–on Christmas Day. Indeed, it just wouldn’t have seemed like Christmas without Chicago at Brooklyn, Oklahoma City at New York, Miami at Los Angeles (Lakers), Houston at San Antonio and Los Angeles (Clippers) at San Francisco.
* No, we’ll never rebottle the network TV genie, especially when it comes to football. But wouldn’t it be nice if cameras didn’t linger on all the trash-talking, gesticulating boors who play to the cheap seats through juvenile, look-at-me antics.