A glut of televised bowls

Of the 35 scheduled college bowl games, ESPN will televise 31 of them, with the Military Bowl, to be played between Marshall and Maryland (how these two schools qualify as playing in a bowl with the title Military remains to be answered), to be broadcast on ESPN2. It is hard to believe that the network can get the audiences and ratings large enough for such games as the New Orleans bowl (Tulane vs. La. Lafayette), the Beef "O" Brady's bowl (E. Carolina vs. Ohio) the Poinsettia bowl (Utah State vs. No. Illinois) and the New Mexico bowl (Washington State vs. Colorado State) to justify televising them to mostly small-market areas of the country, especially with the NBA and NHL playing on opposite cable channels.


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add TV bowls: One has to be a real fan to watch East  Carolina play  Ohio U. or Utah State butt helmets with Northern Illinois. It's a fact that  viewers  on the West Coast, especially in the large markets of  Los Angeles and San Francisco, have more entertaining options.
Of the four games that are not on ESPN, one is on CBS (the Sun bowl), and one is on Fox (the Cotton Bowl). The other two (the Las Vegas bowl and the Capital One bowl) are on ABC, which is owned by Disney which owns ESPN.


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second add TV bowls: There was a time when only four bowl games were played, all on New Year's Day. CBS televised the Cotton Bowl, ABC had the TV rights to the Rose Bowl, the Orange Bowl was shown on NBC and the Sugar Bowl also belonged to ABC. CBS' broadcast of the Cotton Bowl featured Lindsey Nelson calling the play-by-play. Keith Jackson was the announcer for many Rose Bowl games. The Sugar Bowl eventually moved to New Year's Eve to garner a bigger audience, which it did when such teams as Alabama and Notre Dame played each other.