Locations of bowl games - how are they chosen?

[Mr. Laser Beam]

I'm curious about bowl games...how is it determined where they will be held? Do the organizers just pick any arena that happens to be handy, or is there something that dictates that a specific bowl game must be held in a certain city or stadium?

I ask this because there's two football bowl games (Emerald Bowl and St. Petersburg Bowl) that are held in baseball-only parks (AT&T Park and Tropicana Field, respectively). I always thought that was rather silly, really. Why would they ever hold a football bowl game in a park that wasn't built *for* football? Were there no real football stadia available for those two games? (For instance, the Emerald Bowl. Wasn't Candlestick Park available for that? It's still in San Francisco, after all)

It would seem logical, wouldn't it, to hold a football bowl game in a football stadium? Then they wouldn't have to shoehorn a football field into a place that clearly was not meant for it. I mean, those parks I mentioned (AT&T and Tropicana) aren't even the crappy multipurpose/cookie cutter type; they were built only for baseball. Why ruin that by trying to cram a football game into them after the fact?

Of course, I freely admit that my love for baseball is coloring my judgment on this; silly though it may be, I get pissed when the purity of a baseball-only park is violated by having a football game played in it (they went to all the trouble to build AT&T Park for the SF Giants - because, after all, Candlestick Park sucked for baseball - and now this?). I'm just wondering *why* this happens.

 

[Augustus]

Each Bowl is like a business or separate entity from the NCAA or the conferences. They merely strike a deal with a stadium, pay them, get a sponsor for the game "The Valero Alamo Bowl" for example.

So the bowls of lesser importance or the ones in financial trouble probably go for the cheapest venue available which sometimes is a baseball park.

Then they invite teams to play there.

 

[Smiley]

My guess is that the baseball-only venues offer more seating, better parking, better customer benefits, or something else that those paying the money want to have. The root answer to most venue questions is money, followed closely by availability and tradition.

 

[Mr. Laser Beam]

The root answer to most venue questions is money, followed closely by availability and tradition.

Tradition...how ironic.

It just seems a bit sad, really; we're just now clawing our way out from under the shadow of multipurpose/cookiecutter stadiums, and now they go and do this.

Oh well, at least they're only doing this with two parks, and even then it's only one game a year each. And I'm just guessing that whatever they have to do to make AT&T and the Trop host these bowl games does not harm their intended use for baseball. I think they just slap in a temporary section of bleachers, kind of like what they used to do at Angel Stadium for the Rams (and that turned out fine - looking at that place now, you'd never know that football was ever played there ) and plant new grass to temporarily cover the baseball diamond.

I did get an interesting response from one of the Emerald Bowl honchos. He said that they actually considered Candlestick Park, but it was in such horrible state of repair that they decided against it. Now *that's* ironic. Candlestick apparently sucks for both baseball AND football!