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Rams Bowled Over
The Denver Post Feature Story
Dec. 17, 2001
By Natalie Meisler NEW ORLEANS - Sometime next summer when the Mountain West Conference conducts its football preview for the media, Colorado State players will tell their peers that the MWC's third bowl is the best place to be in December. The New Orleans Bowl offers much better weather than Memphis, Tenn., does for the Liberty Bowl, and it's an even bigger party atmosphere. Regular-season trips to play UNLV make Las Vegas less appealing. The only negative for the Rams is taking a risk against a 5-6 Sun Belt Conference team for Tuesday's 6 p.m. game at the Superdome. The Sun Belt is expected to address changing its selection process in the near future. "This is 30 times more than I've been expecting," CSU defensive tackle Lucas Smith said. "I expected a good time, but didn't expect this. . . . This is a better destination than Las Vegas, and Memphis wasn't as fun as this, but it's against a good opponent from Conference USA." Said CSU senior cornerback Thal Woods: "Any bowl game is good, but this could be the No. 1 bowl for the Mountain West." Rams coach Sonny Lubick said: "You can't beat the stadium, the weather. If this thing can take off and they'd get 40,000 to the game, that's what it would take." Therein lies the rub. With CSU and North Texas each selling about 5,000 tickets (many of which will be donated to local charities) and bowl organizers hoping for 10,000 to 15,000 in local sales, the Superdome could look super-empty even with the top tier draped off. Ticket sales weren't the motivation for creating the bowl. The incentives were bringing in more tourists during the pre-Christmas travel lull, executive director Ron Maestri said, while giving the newly formed Sun Belt football conference a place to send its champion. Sun Belt commissioner Wright Waters in turn reached out to the man who preceded him in his job, Mountain West commissioner Craig Thompson, for an opponent. In a year when 9-3 Hawaii is left out of the bowl picture and the ACC buys Clemson's way into the Humanitarian Bowl in Boise, Idaho, no one in the MWC will complain about a trip to New Orleans. "A CSU player came over to me when we were measuring the rings and put his hands on my shoulders and said, 'I don't know who you are, but thank you, thank you,' " Maestri said. It could take months to figure out the bottom line. MWC bowl participants will pool revenues to offset any financial hits each institution takes from unsold tickets before any other member school gets a distribution. So no bowl money for New Mexico, Air Force, Wyoming, San Diego State or UNLV. Each nonbowl school received an estimated $20,000 from CSU's Liberty Bowl share last year. CSU sales are approaching 5,000 tickets at $40 each. Athletic director Jeff Hathaway's goal is breaking even, but no one is sure where the break-even bar is located. Brigham Young has sold 5,000 Liberty Bowl tickets while Utah is struggling with the Christmas Day timing of the Las Vegas Bowl. Only a few hundred have been sold by the Utes. Thompson said the TV contract has locked that bowl into Christmas for two more years.
The Liberty Bowl pays $1.2 million per team, the Las Vegas Bowl $800,000 and
the New Orleans Bowl the minimum $750,000. Unsold tickets are subtracted
from payment. Where the bottom line falls, nobody knows.
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