College Football Bowl Season: Unscripted Entertainment at Its Finest

Why do we invest our time in the tv programs we watch? To be educated? To be entertained? Sure. Mostly, though, it’s to see what happens. Will your favorite nouveau cowboys save the ranch? Will the fish-out-of-water protagonist find romance while relearning the value of the holidays? The story unfolds. We watch and we wait to see what happens, and we pull for the good guys.

Sporting events take this notion to the extreme. When your favorite team takes the field, there’s no script that dictates the outcome. Your team, their opponent, you, and everybody else all watch what happens in real time, and there’s no guarantee that the good guys are going to win.

Here at the end of the calendar year, the real showcase for sporting events on cable are the college football bowl games, and they’re a prime opportunity to promote your business to a devoted fan base. Your local team — maybe your alma mater — gets a chance to end the season with a win. At the turn of the year, teams play for the championship, and all the good stuff is on cable.

Of the 31 non-New Year’s Six bowls last season, 29 surpassed 1 million viewers, 18 drew more than 2 million fans, and 9 topped 3 million viewers. Bowl season last year averaged 2.57 million viewers across ESPN networks, which was up 12% year-over-year.

This season, Ohio State, Georgia, Michigan, and TCU vie for the national championship. Across the Optimum Media footprint, many teams of geographic importance are involved in bowl games, like Arkansas, Baylor, Houston, Marshall, Mississippi State, Oklahoma, Oklahoma State, Ole Miss, TCU, Texas, and Texas Tech.

Be sure to include the prime programming of college football bowl games on cable television as a part of your media plan going into the new year. Make yourself visible to this large and loyal audience. Contact your Optimum Media account executive for package availability.