}}}}"Second, for three weeks college fans travel for basketball to watch their team advance through March Maddness."

Uh, Duke HALF-fills basketball tourney first and second round games in friggin’ Charlotte, NC. That joint seats about 30,000. A football stadium seats about 90,000. Who would travel to Miami one week, L.A. the next, and then Phoenix the week after that?

}}}}}"While many fans will find this task unaffordable plenty will be able to manage and fill the venues. The rest of us will watch at home on TV, like most of us do now."

Most of “you” who watch it on TV need to think more about money… not the BCS. The money to actually put on a football game. How much do you think it costs (from your little sofa) to run a 90,000 fan, national TV, event? You have to have hotel space, you have to have ice in the coolers, you have to have electricity and MASSIVE TV production space. You have to have lines on the field, concessions in the stands and enough restaurants to feed 90,000 travelers to your city.

Who pays for all of that? Who takes care of all that? The bowls do. The NCAA tournament is MUCH smaller, and four teams play in one city, as opposed to two teams at one site. They can sell out a 30,000 seat arena, because there are FOUR schools buying tickets. The NFL playoffs are HOME GAMES, of course they sell out. The NBA, MLB and hockey leagues all do it the same way, and believe me, home games won’t work for a college football playoff. TCU doesn’t have the facilities to host that kind of game.

You have to use the bowls. They have the cash, the stadiums, they have the hotel rooms blocked, the streets cleared for the team busses and all the operational pieces in place. In essence, they have the keys to the city.

Now that you (on your little lay-z-boy) understand the basics of event management a bit more, let me ask you again. WHO PAYS FOR IT?!?!! The bowls do. Why? Because they bring in 90,000 people to their city for the events. Tourism dollars. Without that, it’s harder than you seem to realize.

So, go back to your comment about sitting at home like "most people." If everyone did that (which they will if given the choice to traveling now or waiting to travel for "the big game") then Bill Hancock is right. No one will be there. Why does that matter? Because the bowls won’t put forth the effort if everyone stays home. There’s no incentive for them.

And seriously, you want to watch a 1/3 full football game on your sofa, check out the pro-bowl. There’s some excitement. There’s more to the logistics of this kind of event than you seem to be able to grasp. The talking heads don’t always know what they’re talking about.

There is exactly one bowl with a non-trivial amount of traditon, and that’s the Rose. And the BCS is chipping away at that; with the 1998-2005 BCS arrangement forcing several non-Big Ten/Pac 10 Rose Bowls, and Ohio State and USC’s appearances in the BCS title game depriving the Rose of either the Big Ten or Pac 10 champion (but, oddly, never both at the same time). And the post-2009 agreement that requires the Rose to take a non-AQ team the first time one has an autobid and the Big Ten or Pac 10 champ is in the title game is going to whittle that tradition down even farther.

Bowls with no name other than the name of their corporate sponsor? No meaningful tradition.

Bowls whose conference ties are less than tweny years old? No meaningful tradition.

Bowls that are perfectly willing to throw their conference ties to the wind when an opportunity to grab a higher-revenue team comes their way? No meaningful tradition.

Wetzel is right. The bowls are leeches, and college football should end its association with them.