Top Five Worst Types Of Sponsored College Bowl Names

In a previous post, we recounted the top five reasons why college football bowl games have sold out to corporate interests and diluted their products. Here, we examine the issues with one particular extreme type of sellout -- the ridiculousness that ensures from handing your entire bowl name over the corporate sponsor.

1. Bowl.com
The phrase ".com" has no place whatsoever in the name of a bowl game. Not only is it unwieldy, it is completely contrary to the tradition that college football is supposed to represent. Names like the Rose Bowl, the Sun Bowl, and the Cotton Bowl are timeless and connote the pastoral agricultural era of yore. Slap a dot-com on and you are transported forward to the technology-driven 21st century world of Silicon Valley.
Examples: MicronPC.com Bowl, Insight.com Bowl, Galleryfurniture.com Bowl.

2. CIWM Bowl (Corporate Initials Without Meaning)
In my humble opinion (and when is it ever anything but humble?), unless your company is well established, initials don't tell me a damn thing. I would assume most people know that KFC stands for Kentucky Friend Chicken and you can deduce that AT&T is American Telephone and Telegraph. But even a visit to the MPC Computers website doesn't tell me anything about what MPC stands for. If your brand name doesn't stand for anything, it is just a collection of letters.
Examples: MPC Computers Bowl, GMAC Bowl

3. History For Rent Bowl
When you tack the sponsor's name onto the bowl, it maintains a semblance of tradition. Whether you call it the USF&G Sugar Bowl, the Nokia Sugar Bowl, and the Allstate Sugar Bowl are all still the Sugar Bowl. But when you throw out a name that has been used for forty years, just because a certain fast food restaurant sends extra money your way, you sever all connection with the past. And because these contracts rarely last for more than five years, you have the possibility of frequent name changes with no way to carry forward the tradition and history except by referring to it as "That Bowl Game in Atlanta -- you know, the one usually but not always played a couple of days before New Year's Day."
Examples: Chick-Fil-A Bowl, Capital One Bowl, Outback Bowl

4. Your Name Here Bowl
Unlike their predecessors, these bowls have no tradition to displace. From day one, these recently-created bowls were named after some corporation. But the corporation name changes every two or three years. Since there is little connection between the various names from year to year, these bowls can't even create the history that the corporate name would destroy.
Example: Blockbuster Bowl, Carquest Bowl, MicronPC Bowl, Champs Sports Bowl (all of which actually refer to the same bowl game)

5. Unnecessarily Long Name Dictated By Corporate Sponsor Bowl
I propose a rule that college bowl names should be no longer than two words or four syllables. But, when the corporate sponsor buys the bowl name, it must insist that the name be long enough to accurately convey and distinguish the corporation's product. It's not enough to call it the Meineke Bowl, because how will the public figure out that Meineke is a car care center? The worst offender of these species are the bowls that don't trust the consumers to figure out the website name themselves, and therefore, must throw a ".com" at the end of an already distasteful bowl title.
Examples: Meineke Car Care Bowl, Continental Tire Bowl, Papajohns.com Bowl