Once again the winner of the Outback Bowl was Tampa Bay. Of course, the Florida Gators sent Urban Meyer out victorious in his last game. And Penn State’s 84-year-old Joe Paterno looked more venerable than vulnerable.
But amid a grid landscape of too many bowl games and too many teams only students and alumni could care about, the Outback lucked out again with a quality match, large crowd, chamber-of-commerce weather and big ratings for ABC.
The game’s regional economic impact is easily in eight figures. It’s annual manna for the hospitality industry. And all those network cut-a-way shots of beaches, sailboats, a waterfront skyline and Bayshore Boulevard–beamed back to shivering northern markets–are incalculable.
And, for what it’s worth, the Outback Bowl–as opposed to, say, the Meineke Car Care, Chick-fil-A, GoDaddy.com, TicketCity and others–even sounds like a bowl game.