Brent Schrotenboer

USA TODAY Sports

Sometime in the next several years, the powerful overlords of college football finally might decide they've seen enough.

To heck with ticket sales, they might say. Instead of struggling to draw crowds to stadiums, why not just stage some of their postseason bowl games in mammoth television studios?

Even a live studio audience would be optional. All they'd really need is a network to televise the games and sponsors to buy in.

"I don't think it's totally crazy," said AJ Maestas, president of Navigate Research, a marketing research firm that works with several television networks.

It's not totally crazy because college football continues to creep in that direction, with small crowds showing up to watch more lower-tier games, all driven by television viewership.

In 1995-96, there were 18 bowl games. Now there are 38, plus a national championship game — four more bowls than last season, including two at stadiums that seat just 25,000 and 15,000. Next year, bowl organizers are set to add another new lower-tier game that might be fortunate to draw more than 25,000 fans.

That's because even though ticket demand is relatively low for lesser bowls, millions of viewers keep watching, even if it's the Camellia Bowl in Montgomery, Ala., a game that drew just 20,256 fans last week but attracted an average television audience of 1,114,000, according to ESPN.

Last season, schools and conferences again struggled to sell their bowl ticket allotments and were required to pay for a record $23.8 million in unsold tickets, according to NCAA financial records. Many bowl games in recent years also have tried to offload tickets on discount sites such as Groupon.

But on television, bowl games are a sure thing, having drawn much larger audiences than other sports programming, not to mention other content on other channels. And that's what really matters these days.

"Fans are voting with their remotes and with their eyeballs," said Ilan Ben-Hanan, ESPN's vice president for programming and acquisitions. "I take issue with the notion of judging what's a good idea based on how many people are in the stands. There are a lot of sports out there that would kill to have tens of thousands of people in the stands."

Only one bowl game last year drew fewer than 1.2 million viewers on average, according to Nielsen. That's better than the 1.1 million who watched an opening day baseball game last year between the New York Yankees and Boston Red Sox. Nationally broadcast regular season baseball games in 2012 and 2013 averaged about 680,000 viewers.

"Anyone who's says we've gotten a saturation doesn't have a sense of history, because people have been saying that for a long time with bowl games specifically and with televised sports in the larger sense," said Stephen Greyser, a professor at Harvard Business School.

ESPN'S BOWL BUSINESS

If not for ESPN, many of these games might not exist. ESPN Events, a subsidiary of ESPN, owns and operates 11 bowl games, including two new ones this year.

All but one of the 39 postseason games this season will be broadcast by ESPN or ABC networks, both owned by The Walt Disney Co.

By owning the games, Charlotte-based ESPN Events can sell tickets and sponsorships to the games and not have to pay an unaffiliated company for TV broadcast rights. It's an investment that usually pays off with a big live TV audience attractive to sponsors.

"We've built a very viable business that we're really pleased with," said Pete Derzis, senior vice president and general manager of ESPN Events.

ESPN declined to reveal financial figures, but the comparative viewership figures show why there's a bull market for bowl games. Consider ESPN's first day of bowls last Saturday. ESPN broadcast four games, including three owned by ESPN Events: the New Mexico Bowl, the Famous Idaho Potato Bowl and the inaugural Camellia Bowl.

All drew at least 1.1 million television viewers on average, even though the stadium attendance didn't top more than 29,000 for any of those three games. Air Force beat Western Michigan Saturday in the Famous Potato Bowl 38-24, a game that drew an announced stadium crowd of only 18,223. On television, ESPN said the game still drew an average of 1.45 million viewers.

"They (ESPN) need live content, even mediocre live content," Maestas told USA TODAY Sports. "Even 400,000 viewers in a sad bowl with 25,000 people in the stands is getting better (viewership) than 100 channels out there."

The value of the games is not just because live viewers are coveted by advertisers who want their commercials watched live instead of recorded and skipped on the DVR — a problem with non-sports content. It's also because the size of the television audiences helps ESPN beat the competition and command more in subscriber fees from cable and satellite providers.

For example, Saturday's bowl programming on ESPN averaged about 1.66 million, from 11 a.m. to 1 a.m. ET. By comparison, Fox Sports 1, averaged about 472,000 during the same period with a menu that included college basketball and mixed martial arts, according to data provided by ESPN.

SCHOOLS WANT MORE

Major college football has grown from 118 teams in 2004 to 125 this year, which also has led to more teams with at least six wins, the minimum needed to be bowl eligible. This season, there were 81 for 76 spots in 38 bowl games, meaning there would have been enough eligible teams for 40 bowl games this year.

And that's generally what conference commissioners want: No team left behind. A chicken in every pot and a bowl for every eligible team.

Schools, coaches and players also want it — going to a bowl game means more possible donations, more television exposure, more practice time and more bonus money.

To meet demand, new bowls have been added for lower-tier conference teams that previously were left home during the bowl season. For example, Conference USA this year created the Bahamas Bowl, a game it owns and manages.

Western Kentucky (8-5) beat Central Michigan (7-6) in this game Wednesday 49-48, playing in an empty-looking stadium that seated 15,000. ESPN viewership numbers weren't immediately available. The announced attendance was 13,667.

"These (new) games are a product of certain conferences being underserved by the system," Derzis told USA TODAY Sports. The lower-tier leagues "want to make sure that they have the opportunity to experience the postseason as others do. That's really been the impetus of the expansion."

And there could be more. While Alabama-Birmingham is dropping its football program, four schools are in the process of moving up to the major college level: Appalachian State, Charlotte, Georgia Southern and Old Dominion.

Asked how big the system could still grow, Wright Waters, the executive director of the Football Bowl Association, said he hopes to have "the right number of games for the number of teams eligible — so we don't leave anybody at home."

SPREADING THE WEALTH

The bowl system isn't just a gold rush for ESPN. Last year, the bowls paid out $310 million to conferences and schools. After spending $98 million on travel, unsold tickets and other expenses, the schools and conferences combined to receive a "profit" of $212 million, according to NCAA records.

But that revenue comes with some disclaimers:

Most of that money came from the five biggest bowl games, which play in front of huge audiences in stadiums and on television. The Rose, Sugar, Orange and Fiesta Bowls, plus the national championship game combined to pay out $211 million of that $310 million total. That windfall was shared with the lower-tier conferences, helping them cover the costs of their own trips to the lower-tier bowl games.

Several schools said they lost money on past bowl games, largely because of their travel expenses and unsold tickets. Connecticut, for example, said it lost about $1.7 million on its Fiesta Bowl trip in 2011.

Even so, the schools still want bowl games. And so do the host cities, where 25,000 fans are considered a welcome spike for the holiday economy.

"There seems to be a desire by a lot of communities to be part of the college football postseason experience, which is very healthy right now," Derzis said.

The lucrative new four-team College Football Playoff promises to greatly increase revenues for all 10 major college football conferences, spreading the wealth even more for the lower-tier conferences slotted for smaller bowl games.

However, the new playoff could make the lower-tier games seem even less relevant.

It depends on the viewpoint. The average attendance for bowl games has declined each of the past six seasons, down to 49,116 last season, the lowest mark since 1978-79, when there were 15 bowls, according to the NCAA bowl record book.

At the same time, ticket sales generally have decreased in importance for bowl revenues. They accounted for $150 million – about 33% — of the $445 million in total gross receipts for all bowl games in 2012-13, according to the most recent available data on gross bowl receipts obtained by USA TODAY Sports. That percentage had decreased every year since 2008-09, when ticket sales comprised nearly 38% of all bowl revenue.

Television and media revenue, sponsorships and other sources make up the rest.

"More money in sports is starting to come from TV than from tickets," Maestas said. "There was a day when the only thing that justified the game going on was ticket sales, because there was no TV. We are heading to the day when it's possible to put on a college football event with no fans."