Kelly Lyell

kellylyell@coloradoan.com

A bowl game in Fort Collins?

Why not?



There’s a lot to do here in the winter.

Skiing, snowshoeing and hiking in the mountains just west of town. Touring some of the almost two dozen local breweries. Breakfasts, lunches and dinners at local restaurants and food trucks.

And Old Town Square is a natural location for a pregame pep rally, featuring the marching bands, cheerleaders and mascots of the participating teams.

Our winter weather could be a concern, but it’s no worse than Boise, Idaho, where the CSU football team faced Idaho on Dec. 22 in a bowl game at Boise State’s Albertsons Stadium that’s been around for 20 years.

The Famous Idaho Potato Bowl is one of five bowl games played each year at the home stadiums of Mountain West schools. New Mexico hosts a bowl game at University Stadium, and the city-run facilities where Hawaii, San Diego State and UNLV play their games also are home to postseason events.

The story behind Boise State's blue football field

None of those stadiums are as nice as the new $220 million facility opening this fall at Colorado State University.

“It could be done,” said Kurt Colicchio, owner of the Fort Collins Foxes and founder of the Mountain Collegiate Baseball League. “I think in terms of the stadium and the location and everything else, all the surrounding assets are there.”

Colicchio actually toyed with the idea of trying to start a bowl game at CSU’s Hughes Stadium about eight or nine years ago. He talked to longtime CSU athletics administrator Gary Ozzello, now the school’s directory of community outreach and engagement, about what it would take. But with an NCAA moratorium on new bowl games in place at the time, it never got past the initial discussions.

“I could see it having some life, but there would be some significant obstacles,” said Ted Tseng, president and founder of the Mile High Bowl Association.

Tseng, now the director of sales and marketing for the Denver Outlaws professional lacrosse team, has spearheaded efforts to bring a college football bowl game to Denver since 2009. He was hoping to line up Vail Resorts or Intrawest, owners of some of the state’s largest ski areas, as a title sponsor and tie the game into promoting the state’s ski industry.

9 projects will change Fort Collins' skyline in 2017

The project, Tseng said, also was put on hold because of a job change he made, as well as another NCAA moratorium on certifying new bowl games. Denver was stuck at the time behind proposed bowls in Austin, Texas, Charleston, South Carolina, and Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, in the certification process.

Two new games were added in 2015 — the Arizona and Cure bowls — bringing the number of college bowl games to 40. That required the NCAA to create new rules to fill those games when fewer than 80 of the 128 teams in the Football Bowl Subdivision finished with the six wins necessary to qualify. Two teams with 5-7 records were needed to fill the bowls in 2015 and one 6-7 team and two that were 5-7 were needed this year to avoid having to cancel one of the games.

The latest moratorium, enacted in April, runs through the 2018 season.

“There’s no question we’ve reached the saturation point now, so that’s going to make it harder,” said Bret Gilliland, deputy commissioner of the Mountain West and a member of the NCAA’s Division I Football Oversight Committee.

NCAA approval, though, is only one small step in the process of starting up a new bowl game.

The biggest hurdle is finding a sponsor with deep pockets. Payouts would have to be $1.5 million or more per team to draw the kind of top-tier programs it would take to fill the new CSU stadium’s 36,000 seats, Colicchio and Tseng said.

The higher the payout a bowl could offer, the better quality teams it can attract through contracts with conferences to provide the participating teams.

“I think the main obstacle anyone would be looking at is the bowl tie-ins,” Colicchio said. “If you’re going to do a game, you want to do one where people are interested. When you’re starting to scrape the bottom of the barrel with the low-tier finishers in a conference, you’re not going to get fan interest at all.”

The Mountain West, Gilliland said, is maxed out on bowl tie-ins with primary spots in six games, backup spots in two others and the opportunity every year for its champion to earn a spot in the College Football Playoff’s Cotton, Fiesta or Peach bowls as the top-rated champion from a Group of 5 conference. Other conferences are maxed out, too, with the Big Ten and Big 12 both unable to fill all of their contracted slots this season.

Another significant hurdle would be getting a national television contract. The Arizona Bowl in Tucson, which the MW helped start, is the only bowl game without one, although it was available in more homes this year on independent local and regional stations than the Cure Bowl in Orlando, Florida, which was televised by CBS-Sports Network.

ESPN owns and operates 13 bowl games, including the Idaho Potato, Hawaii, Las Vegas and New Mexico bowls, and televises 36 on its primary network or partners ABC and ESPN2. ESPN created many of the bowl games to provide programming during the holiday season.

“If you look at the rating numbers, they continue to do well for them,” Gilliland said. “But I think what they’re running out of is programming slots. Between the NFL and the (College Football Playoff) and all the bowl games, I don’t think there are that many windows left, if any.”

New Year to bring new look to Fort Collins

With a population of about 156,000, Fort Collins is smaller than any of the cities now hosting bowl games. Shreveport, Louisiana, where the Independence Bowl has been played annually since 1976, is the smallest with about 200,000 residents. Fewer than 30,000 fans attended that game between Vanderbilt and North Carolina State on Dec. 26 in a stadium that seats 65,000.

The Northern Colorado region has about 250,000 residents, roughly a third the population of the Boise area.

So community support would be critical. Not just from CSU and city leaders but also from local business organizations and the general public. Bowl games rarely fill the stadiums they’re played in, but you’d still need a core group of fans who would buy tickets to come see the game, no matter what teams were playing. You’d also need a small administrative staff and dozens of volunteers to organize, promote and streamline operations of the game and its auxiliary events.

Although only two hotels in Fort Collins — the Hilton and Marriott — are large enough to house a visiting college football team and provide the dining and meeting spaces each would need, there are two more in Loveland that would work and enough hotel rooms in the region to accommodate fans of the participating teams.

Practice fields, including an indoor facility, are available at CSU, three local high schools and one middle school with an artificial turf field and the Loveland Sports Park.

“What you need to get are decent teams. And, obviously, the conferences have to buy into what you’re offering, and what you’re offering at the end of the day is how much money you can give to each team and that comes from your sponsorship dollars," Colicchio said. "You’d have to get a big-time sponsor that’s willing to write a check with enough zeros to entice the conferences to come and play.”

“I think somebody could do a bowl game here.”

Follow reporter Kelly Lyell at twitter.com/KellyLyell and facebook.com/KellyLyell.news