Bowl Game Concept Deserves A Comeback
Bowl Game Concept Deserves A Comeback
One of the concepts that has been allowed to slip away these past few years is that of the bowl game.
An idea energized by Steve Siano as part of URugby (see video below from 2015), bowl games provide a nice cap to the season for college teams.
What Siano did was have all the bowl games play in one venue with live streaming, fans, and some trappings to make it special. The idea has merit.
The teams looking to form a competition under USCRO have been talking about bowl games and the idea that every team in USCRO, if they want, can end their 15s season with a bowl game. So you’d have a small number of teams play in the playoffs, and the rest of the teams would still be able to plan for a big game at the end of the season.
The idea, even if you don’t make it a fancy event, has merit. Even if a team is not on track to make the playoffs, it can target a bowl game to finish off the season.
Bowl games are also a great way to celebrate inter-conference rivalries. As we will likely see DIAA rugby change to being called just DI, we’ll see a move to blur the lines between DIAA and DIA. DIA will remain DIA, but it’s also becoming clear that some DIA teams will move to USCRO, and there’s a movement afoot under Rich Cortez to create a DIAA group in the West that has some DIA membership potentially involved.
So it’s all a little blurred, so then you can have teams mingle in that college rugby DMZ between the divisions and instead focus on rivalries that make sense.
For example, then, how great would it be for the Big 10 and the SCRC to meet up in December to play a series of bowl games? The games would be compelling. They’d be something the players could look forward to even if they start the year 0-4, and they’d give everyone a chance to end the fall with some bragging rights.
The MARC, a conference definitely in some governing body no man’s land at the moment, and the Chesapeake (ditto), could meet up.
The Heart of America could meet up with teams from the Red River. The bowl games would be set more along geographic lines rather than whatever anyone else sees as a marketing opportunity.
The bowl games would be fun to watch, and would provide a small live-streaming opportunity for someone like FTF or Next Level Rugby or FloRugby or ESPN+ if they wanted. But more than that, it would allow us to reduce these bloated playoff brackets.
There is no reason for a team that hasn’t won its conference to get into the national playoffs (sorry, we know that would have meant no Western Michigan in the DIAA fall final). Going to national playoffs is expensive, and not the be-all and end-all for most players. Those student-athletes want to be able to play challenging fun rugby without having to take out a loan to pay for it and without having to put studying on the backburner every weekend because they’ve got to travel ten hours, or stay overnight, for games.
A reward weekend with a bowl game would also tie in with any playoffs we somehow come up with. You put them all in the same venue, so everyone knows (like with the Women’s Premier League finals weekend), that they will be making the trip to Blugenville, East Virginia December 4, and can plan for it.
Bowl games. It was a good idea a few years ago, and it still is.
