College football fans who also enjoy corporate branding are receiving perhaps their greatest holiday gift yet this season. Coming off the Chic-fil-A Bowl, the Franklin American Mortgage Music City Bowl, and the New Era Pinstripe Bowl, the only bowl game named after a pattern, New Years Day's TV bowl schedule offers us the prestigious Ticketcity Bowl (ESPN U at 11 AM), the Progressive Gator Bowl—tea-party gators need not apply, 12:30 PM on ESPN 2—and the 3:30 PM Rose Bowl Presented By Vizio, which, if you bought your flat-panel TV at Wal-Mart in the last 12 months, it probably factually is. New Years' Bowl coverage concludes with the 7 PM, appropriately sponsored Tostitos Fiesta Bowl, which is the ideal branding situation. (Named similarly you'd have just finished watching the Ticketcity I-checked-StubHub-already Bowl, the Progressive Ambiguously-attractive-ad-campaign-girl Bowl, and the Vizio Price-Shopping Bowl.
↵What I don't understand is why companies sponsor these bowl games, when their sponsorship has been proven, already, to cause people to spontaneously vacate all respect they had for the bowl games beforehand. If nobody has heard of your brand already, sponsoring a bowl that takes place in the middle of October is only going to confirm, in the minds of the football-watching public, that your brand is one of those brands nobody's ever heard of.
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