BIRMINGHAM, Alabama -- A New Year's Day ticket to watch Mississippi State-Northwestern at the Gator Bowl can be had for $1.
The get-in price to see Florida State-Northern Illinois at the Orange Bowl is $10.
It's $14 to watch the SEC and Big Ten runner-ups, Georgia and Nebraska, play at the Capital One Bowl.
Those ticket prices can be found by savvy fans on the secondary market. They're just the latest example of the devaluing of some of college football's bowl games, which kept expanding over the past decade.
Last year's average bowl rating was the lowest in the 14-year history of the Bowl Championship Series and dropped 37 percent since the BCS-era high of 1998, when there were 13 fewer bowls. Fewer TV viewers coincided with the 2011-12 average bowl attendance dipping below 51,000 for the first time since 1979. Back in 2002, there were 25 bowls that averaged 53,392 fans per game.
"I think the bowls are so much a part of the fabric of America and they're challenged right now," said Wright Waters, executive director of the Football Bowl Association. "Maybe we can kind of clean it up a little bit and make it better."
In two years, a four-team playoff arrives reportedly worth $470 million annually -- up from $180 million a year with the current BCS. The playoff could rejuvenate some bowls yet also provide a larger divide in the postseason pecking order.
The national semifinals will rotate through six bowl games, creating two playoff games and four major bowl games each season. The Rose, Sugar and Orange have spots in the playoff rotation. The Fiesta, Cotton and Chick-Fil-A are expected to be the other three bowls with access to the national semifinals. The championship game site will be bid out.
It's not clear how many bowl tie-ins conferences will have and which games will or won't survive. Some of this season's bowl games, which begin Saturday, include flimsy team resumes in order to fill 70 spots.
Twenty of the 35 games (57 percent) involve at least one team that qualified with no more than one victory against a winning Football Bowl Subdivision opponent. Cincinnati won nine games while beating one winning FBS team. Six bowl participants didn't beat a single winning FBS team: Nevada (7-5), East Carolina (8-4), Central Michigan (6-6), Rice (6-6), Vanderbilt (8-4) and Purdue (6-6).
The Boilermakers' reward for firing their coach and finishing at .500: Playing on New Year's Day.
Where did New Year's Day go?
Once upon a time, New Year's Day was an all-day celebration of college football with many attractive games.
Yes, there was frustration when the top two teams often played in different bowls. But there was no greater tradition in college football than a fan parking in front of a TV on New Year's Day to watch elite teams all day.
That brand may get resurrected when the playoff arrives in January 2015. But for now, New Year's continues to be a shell of what it used to be.
Back in 2009, the SEC and Big Ten essentially bought Jan. 1 because, well, they could. Bowls shell out lucrative payouts to be associated with the SEC and Big Ten because their fans travel and watch TV like no other conferences do.
From 1953 to 2009, no team without a winning overall record ever played on New Year's Day -- or Jan. 2 in years when Jan. 1 bowls moved to avoid NFL Sundays. That's happened four times in the past four years.
At first, just brand names (Florida State, Florida and Ohio State) invaded New Year's Day with a 6-6 record. Purdue joins that club this year by playing Oklahoma State (7-5) in the Heart of Dallas Bowl on Jan. 1.
Last year's Outback Bowl between Georgia and Michigan State drew the third-smallest crowd in the bowl's 26-year history.
At the 2010 Outback Bowl, Auburn became the first team in 62 years to play on New Year's with a losing conference record. Six more teams have since followed: Northwestern, Texas Tech, Michigan, Florida, Ohio State and now Purdue.
Mississippi State, Purdue and Wisconsin play on New Year's this season with either a .500 or losing conference record, meaning that's occurred in 13 of 33 New Year's bowls over the past six years. That happened in just six of the 221 New Year's bowls from 1968 to 2007.
There was consideration last year to move bowl eligibility from 6-6 to 7-5. It didn't gain much traction.
Waters, the former Sun Belt Conference commissioner, said too many critics of 35 bowls get caught up in the macro view of bowls without examining how many are slotted for each conference. Schools and conferences want those additional bowls, he said.
"I think when people went back to their conferences, they found out there's an awful lot of support for 6-6," Waters said. "That's probably a comment on the uniqueness of football's postseason, that with 35 bowls it means at the end of the year we have 35 winners. That's 35 athletic directors that get a step up on selling season tickets, and 35 coaches who a month later are going out in recruiting and talking about winning the bowl game."
Value of bowl games
Bowl games do add some value. For teams that can't compete at college football's highest level, just making a bowl becomes a milestone marker and a promotional tool for the team and the university. Duke, for example, is playing in its first bowl since 1994.
Coaches get extra practices in bowl season (not to mention bowl bonuses for themselves and administrators). Players get the rare chance under NCAA rules to receive gifts and stockpile mileage money.
Cities can add some tourism revenue during what's typically a down time of the year. ESPN can produce cheap programming that, even with lower ratings, still draws higher viewership than almost anything else it could air over the holidays.
On the other hand, this is a postseason that's sending Pittsburgh to the BBVA Compass Bowl in Birmingham for the third straight year. (Ole Miss says it has sold 20,500 tickets for the game.) It's a system that created a Tulsa-Iowa State rematch at the Liberty Bowl. (Yet Iowa State sold out its allotment of tickets.)
And it's a system that survives by schools often losing money on bowl trips due to ticket guarantees that often go unused and conference revenue-sharing systems.
Most bowl games are run by tax-exempt organizations. Participating teams and conferences combined to pay the bowls $20.9 million last season for unsold tickets, according to USA Today.
USA Today reported that the average salary for the 15 leaders of the non-profit bowls is about three times more than the average for a nonprofit chief executive of mid-to-large charities. Five bowl directors make more than the CEO of the American National Red Cross, who last year made $561,000 while overseeing revenues of $3.5 billion. By contrast, Outback Bowl President Jim McVay made $753,946 in 2010 with revenues of $10 million.
Ticket prices are $87 for the Capital One Bowl on the Georgia and Nebraska web sites -- even though Nebraska (which played in Orlando last year) has sold only about 4,000 tickets and they can be found for $14 in the secondary market. According to The Orlando Sentinel, the Capital One Bowl wanted Texas A&M-Northwestern, but caved to pressure from the SEC and Big Ten to protect the conference runner-ups.
Florida State has sold 4,000 of its 17,000 tickets for the Orange Bowl against Northern Illinois, an unlikely BCS team. Those tickets are going for as low as $10 elsewhere.
Virginia Tech is forced to sell tickets for the Russell Athletic Bowl against Rutgers at $72. They're available for $2 online -- joining the Gator and Music City (Vanderbilt-N.C. State) as bowls with tickets going for as low as less than $10.
"The bowls are in that kind of in-between land of what their communities want and the standards of the NCAA and colleges," Waters said. "I think at the end of the day they say, 'You know, there are a lot of kids getting a lot of opportunities, what's the down side? Why reduce it? Who's getting hurt by too many?'"
College football could ask itself another question: To what degree will fans keep watching?
