Tampa Bay Wins Outback

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.

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