As a sports fan, my instincts direct me to cry foul over the Las Vegas Bowl's choice of Brigham Young over Texas Christian for its 2005 game, slated for December 22 at Sam Boyd Stadium.
TCU is the nation's 14th-ranked team, the Mountain West Conference champion, and has lost only one of 11 games this season. The Horned Frogs even opened the year with a headline-grabbing victory over an Oklahoma squad ranked No. 5 at the time.
BYU, meanwhile, finished the regular season with an uninspiring 6-5 record, coming dangerously close (one loss) to missing out on the postseason altogether and turning in their uniforms in November.
But even though a California-TCU matchup would undoubtedly be more compelling to college football devotees than Cal-BYU, the additional stakes surrounding the 14th annual Las Vegas Bowl make the Cougars' selection understandable and, much as it pains me to say it, even laudable.
I normally don't have any respect for athletic entities that place business interests over on-field considerations. And tapping BYU—which not only has a strong following in Southern Nevada but also is famous for drawing hordes of its Utah-based supporters to road contests—was inarguably a financially driven move.
In this case, though, it wasn't simply about fattening up the bottom line. It was about ensuring there would be a bottom line to fatten. Because this winter, the Las Vegas Bowl is safeguarding its own future, and I find it difficult to challenge the very desire for self-preservation.
To satisfy NCAA requirements for recertification, the bowl needs an average attendance of 25,000 —that's actual bodies through the turnstiles, not tickets purchased —over a three-year span. Though last year's UCLA-Wyoming game set an event record with a crowd of 27,784, a 2003 Christmas Eve game between Oregon State and New Mexico barely drew 18,000, putting the Las Vegas Bowl's future in serious jeopardy.
"This was a critical year for us," Tina Kunzer-Murphy, the bowl's executive director, explains. "Historically they have decertified a bowl game (with average attendance under 25,000), so we're very sensitive to it. We needed around 30,000 to average out to 25,000-plus."
So the committee passed over TCU for BYU, knowing the Cougars would all but guarantee them that number. Sure enough, the strategy worked. From the moment their team was invited, BYU fans snatched up tickets in bundles, and last Friday Kunzer-Murphy announced that the bowl has sold out its seats for the first time ever.
Recertification now being all but automatic, the Las Vegas Bowl lives on, which, whether locals realize it or not, is actually a good thing for Las Vegas. The event raises the area's sports profile, boosts its economy during a traditionally slow week for Southern Nevada's hotels and might provide even the most cynical college football fan here with a desirable matchup from time to time.
Achieving a 2005 attendance figure around 40,000 will certainly create that opportunity, since it will boost three-year averages considerably in both 2006 and 2007.
"Next year, attendance is not going to be an issue, so we're all hoping the (Mountain West Conference) champion is who we're able to take," Kunzer-Murphy says.
Had bowl officials attempted to pretend their pick of BYU had nothing to do with economics, they surely would be open to harsh criticism. But even those who made the decision concede they simply did what had to be done, even if it meant sacrificing some short-term credibility for long-term stability.
"The bowl is a business," Kunzer-Murphy says. "We try to make decisions that are meaningful and make sense athletically, but also are good business decisions. If you don't, you're not in this business for long."