100% will be on my TVs. A lot of the smaller bowls have trouble selling all of their tickets and have even less opportunity to be seen on the big networks. Without the TV money, a lot of those smaller bowls could not even survive. ESPN has a monopoly on covering of sporting events and has the programming time to provide slots for those smaller bowls. Good for ESPN to provide coverage and somehow make money doing so!
They are also calling this the worst season ever for bowl games, with just 2 decent match ups in the entire circuit. Of the 2 bowl bound teams from my state, one is playing a team that gave up 70 points in their championship game and the other doesn’t even have a winning record.
I expect this will change in the future as CBS and NBC have launched cable sports networks (and FOX is about to)
If ESPN doesn’t show them, who will?
The networks only want the “premiere” bowls. While NBC, CBS, and Fox are developing national cable sports channels, they’re still really in the process of getting going, and can’t compete with ESPN on level terms yet.
The problem isn’t that ESPN is showing most of the bowl games, it’s that most of the bowl games are so niche in interest that ESPN is the only national player with the interest to show them.
And nobody is going to watch them...heck, it’s even hard for me to get excited about Florida-Louisville in the Sugar Bowl.