Kurtenbach: Don’t blame the Bay Area for college football’s mistakes

We’ve seen the Bay Area and Levi’s Stadium successfully host big sporting events in recent years — the Super Bowl and Wrestlemania come to mind.

So why is this the College Football Playoff National Championship not getting the game amount of buzz? Why are ticket prices cratering? Why is there the threat of empty seats? And why is the game already being written off as a failure?

The answer, of course, is simple:

This game — like any big sporting event — is supposed to be a party.

But who the hell schedules a party for 5 p.m. on a weeknight in the most expensive suburbs in America?

And who would want to go to a party where the guests are a bunch of people you don’t know, who live 2,200 miles away? (But don’t worry, they all know each other… all too well.)

No one who would consider themselves “casually interested,” that’s for sure.

Even rabid fans — who likely live thousands of miles away — would need a bit more convincing before flying in for that one. (4K TVs are pretty awesome.)

As a result, anyone can get into the title game for a 75 percent discount off the (ridiculous) face value of a ticket.

It makes perfect sense to me.

But what doesn’t make sense is how this disastrous idea of an event has turned into a referendum on the Bay Area.

“Behold Santa Clara, the worst National Championship venue available” opined college football’s self-appointed ombudsman, Spencer Hall, in a column last week that was then re-created dozens of times over by college football’s insular media.

But I would argue that Santa Clara is the perfect venue for the National Championship Game — so long as we’re talking about the one college football’s power brokers, the Power 5 conference commissioners and the College Football Playoff board of managers, envisioned when they created the contest out of thin air.

They could have placed their much-ballyhooed end-of-season showdown anywhere. They chose a soulless stadium amid a sea of corporate campuses. Isn’t that telling?

They did that, without remorse because they think they created a product that is multitudes better than it actually is. They think that they have a truly national event, like the Super Bowl.

They don’t. They never did. And I doubt they ever will.

The Bay Area has told them exactly that in the buildup to Monday’s game, just as the Phoenix suburb of Glendale did two years ago.

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College football is a massive sport in large part because of the pomp and circumstance. Go to Tuscaloosa, Alabama, Clemson, South Carolina, or hundreds of college towns across the nation on a Saturday and it’s an all-day party.

And bowl games, believe it or not, can recreate that atmosphere.

Timing has a lot to do with that. It’s no accident that the best bowl games — the ones people really care about — come in that incredible no man’s land between Christmas and New Year’s Day.

You know, the period where no one is really working and everyone is traveling. It’s anarchy in corporate America — the year’s longest weekend.

It’s a great time to skip town. After all, you have a few sick days you need to use before the end of the year — why not go to a game in Pasadena or Miami (or even Santa Clara)?

Get some sun, let loose, have a few beers — revel in the school pride and watch some good football.

And if you have a bowl game in your backyard, why not stop by and see what all the fuss is about? It’s a holiday, after all.

But Monday starts the first full week back at work for just about everyone in a 9-to-5 job. The party is officially over.

But that’s when the college football power brokers decided to host their “Super Bowl”.

In a corporate park stadium.

Thousands of miles away from the fanbases of the teams playing in the game.

Say what you will about the overwhelming corporatism of the Super Bowl — at least you can spend all day Sunday drinking $19 beers.

ESPN — the real power broker who is paying those other, lesser power brokers’ salaries — doesn’t care that it makes no sense to play this game outside of driving range for the two teams competing, though. After all, they have tremendous television for the gloomiest night of the year. Don’t forget: this is a company that creates bowl games and places them in football-crazy areas like the Bahamas so they can fill programming hours in December.

And I doubt the conference commissioners and playoff committee members really care, either. They created a billion-dollar revenue stream — the largest revenue stream in their sport — out of nothing, made it their own image (expense-report chic), and then were paid to spend the week in the Bay Area. It doesn’t matter if 500 people and half the team rosters show up, this is a win for them. I bet some even took a trip to Napa over the weekend.

But when you see empty seats Monday, remember that the blame lies with those parties, not the Bay Area.

It’s not the Bay Area’s fault that these power brokers have no idea what makes their sport great and are delusional about what makes them successful. That they created a game so sanitized, so artificial, and so anti-collegial that it could pique no curiosity from a casual bystander whatsoever.

It’s not the Bay Area’s fault that the sport has become increasingly regionalized to the South in recent years (thanks, in no small part, to wicked mismanagement from the “hosting” conference, the Pac-12), and that those in charge either don’t see it or refuse to accept that fact.

It’s not the Bay Area’s fault (well, not entirely the Bay Area’s fault) that they created a game so inaccessible and inconsiderate that the free market has handed them a dose of serious reality.

And it’s certainly not the Bay Area’s fault for not being interested in Alabama playing Clemson again.

These are college football’s problem, through and through, and making the Bay Area the boogeyman won’t fix them.

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