As far as Ali Farhang can determine, New Mexico State fans bought about 12,000 tickets to last yearโs Arizona Bowl, but it didnโt add up โ there were surely more than 20,000 Aggie fans at the game.
โStrictly through the school, we sold about 12,000,โ said Farhang, chairman and co-founder of the Nova Home Loans Arizona Bowl. โBut those New Mexico State fans came from every direction. Weโll never know how many. Letโs just say they kept the interstates busy north, south, east and west.โ
Beer sales at Arizona Stadium reached almost $200,000, a record that may never be broken, even when the UA is playing someone like Arizona State. And as if scripted by the football gods, New Mexico State โ playing in its first bowl game since 1960 โ won dramatically, in overtime.
Many of the Aggies and their coaches broke into tears.
All of this good fortune took place in Year 3 of the Arizona Bowl, the second-youngest of 41 college football bowl games.
What can it possibly do for an encore?
โIโm not naive enough to think weโll get another New Mexico State,โ Farhang said. โBut our goals are extremely ambitious.โ
Farhang remembers the inaugural Arizona Bowl, 2015, when Nevada beat Colorado State and the gameโs defensive MVP, Nevada linebacker Ian Seau, cuddled the championship trophy and began to cry.
And heโll never forget the sense of patriotism when 33,868 showed up to cheer for Air Force in Arizona Bowl II.
Itโs as if the Arizona Bowl is undefeated, 3-0.
This isnโt typical behavior in a bowl game that isnโt played in Pasadena, California or Miami, Florida and doesnโt have a history stretching to 1916 or 1935. By any measurement, the Arizona Bowl has gone beyond expectations.
By comparison, Tucson’s former Insight.com Bowl, now played in downtown Phoenix, has spent the last seven years going by the name Buffalo Wild Wings Bowl; Ticket City Cactus Bowl; Motel 6 Cactus Bowl and, as of Wednesday night, the Cheez-It Bowl.
The Cheez-It Bowl is invisible in Phoenix. For the last two years, whatever that bowl was called drew fewer fans than the new Arizona Bowl.
โFor our game to endure, weโve got to give it to Tucson; itโs got to belong to the community,โ Farhang said. โWe are a non-profit organization. Thatโs how you build a lasting relationship.โ
In just three years, the Arizona Bowl has distributed more than $500,000 to Tucson charities, and approximately $2.8 million in grants, gifts, tickets and other donations.
Thatโs not always the way the bowl business works. In the mid-market bowl games, the money flows in one direction โ to ESPN.
ESPN has a division called โESPN Eventsโ that owns and operates 13 bowl games. Itโs about as community-oriented as Nike. Last week, ESPNโs โDXL Frisco Bowlโ between San Diego State and Ohio, was played before 11,029 people on a rainy Wednesday night. It was strictly TV programming.
ESPNโs New Mexico Bowl, presented by Progressive, drew an announced crowd of 25,387 on a mid-December Saturday afternoon. On the few occasions ESPNโs cameras displayed a panoramic view of Dreamstyle Stadium, however, it looked like the โ2โ didnโt belong. There looked to be 5,387 in Albuquerque that day.
In 2013, Arizona played in AdvoCare V100 Bowl in Shreveport on a biting cold December afternoon fit for neither man nor beast (nor sportswriters). The good olโ Independence Bowl, also owned by ESPN Events, is now called the Walk-Onโs Bistreaux & Bar Independence Bowl. And itโs not even a local bar, but one based five hours away in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.
Not exactly warm and chummy.
The Arizona Bowl has local roots. Nova Home loans is operated by Tucson mortgage executive Jon Volpe, who is from Amphitheater High School. Farhang played football at Sabino High School.
The gameโs new executive director, Kym Adair, was one of Volpeโs leading marketing executives at Nova. The Arizona Bowl has just four full-time employees, including UA menโs club soccer coach Eric Rhodes and Allyson Tofel, who previously was an executive in the UAโs student affairs and enrollment division.
โWeโre not mechanical,โ Farhang said, smiling. โWe donโt hire someone unless you can do four or five different things for us.โ
Tucsonโs first foray into the bowl business, the 1989 Copper Bowl, was played without a sponsor. Thatโs because the founders of the game โ Merle Miller, Burt Kinerk and Larry Brown โ learned in a hurry not to get entangled in the money game.
In the lead-up to the โ89 Copper Bowl, it was announced that a Texas-based firm calling itself H.S.E. Labs would pay $1.2 million over three years for the game to be called the Breathless Bowl.
It was a financial opportunity that few break-in bowl games could fathom. It would also be selling its name to an outsider, one without much of a track record.
To its credit, after much research, the Copper Bowl walked away from the deal three weeks before kickoff, uncertain that the Texas laboratory was a suitable partner even though a Madison Avenue firm had brokered the deal.
The Copper Bowl went on to have 11 successful seasons before the Fiesta Bowl pirated the game away, moved it to Phoenix and began calling it things like the Cheez-It Bowl.
No thanks.
Now, a generation later, Arizona Bowl IV wonโt turn a lot of heads in college football. Arkansas State and Nevada arenโt sexy brands, but theyโll surely draw more eyes and more local ticket-buyers than, say, the Bad Boy Mowers Gasparilla Bowl, which drew 14,135 in Florida recently, or the Famous Idaho Potato Bowl, which drew 18,711 on a freezing night in Boise.
โYou canโt tell me this game doesnโt matter to the community,โ Farhang said. โItโs by the community and itโs for the community.โ
The Breathless Bowl it ainโt.
