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News With Commentary by TSL Staff Wednesday, June 13, 2001 Music City Bowl Drops Big East The Music City Bowl announced Tuesday that it had signed an agreement with the Big Ten that will invite a Big Ten football team to the bowl to play an SEC team, starting with the 2002 game. The agreement runs for four years, covering the 2002-2005 games. This means that the MCB's brief relationship with the Big East will end after a Big East team plays this season in the 2001 Music City Bowl. After Virginia Tech and Alabama played to a capacity crowd of 41,000 in Vanderbilt Stadium in the inaugural Music City Bowl in 1998, the bowl moved to the Tennessee Titan's 67,000-seat Adelphia Coliseum. Attendance for the 1999 Kentucky-Syracuse matchup was 59,221, but for the 2000 matchup between West Virginia and Mississippi, the crowd was only 47,119, or 70% of capacity. Virginia Tech fans bought approximately 17,000 tickets in 1998, but Syracuse traveled poorly in 1999, and West Virginia uncharacteristically took fewer than 10,000 fans to the game in 2000 (just over 7,000 tickets were sold through the WVU ticket office, according to an article in the Detroit News, and perhaps 2,000 more were purchased directly from the bowl by WVU fans). TV ratings have also not been very impressive for the MCB. In a ranking of all 70 bowl games played in the last three years, the Music City Bowl finished 47th (1999), 52nd (1998) and 54th (2000) when ranked by the number of viewing households. The Music City Bowl is therefore dropping the Big East, which travels relatively poorly and doesn't draw great television ratings, for the Big Ten, which features much larger fan bases and draws better TV ratings. The matchup is the third Big Ten-SEC matchup in the bowls. The Outback Bowl and the Citrus Bowl are the other two bowls. After the coming season, the loss of the Music City Bowl reduces the Big East bowl tie-ins from five to four. After the loss of the MCB, the league will be associated with the BCS Bowls, Toyota Gator Bowl, Insight.com Bowl, and Jeep O'ahu Bowl/Jeep Aloha Bowl Christmas Classics. The Jeep bowls have moved inland from Hawaii and will be named the San Francisco Jeep Bowl and the Jeep Seattle Bowl beginning this season. They will be played on December 30th and January 2nd, respectively, and the Big East will send a single team to one of the bowls.
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