http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/20/sports/ncaafootball/montgomery-ala-prepares-for-the-camellia-bowl-an-espn-creation.html 2014-12-19 19:55:34 Montgomery, Ala., Prepares for the Camellia Bowl, an ESPN Creation Saturday’s game, between South Alabama and Bowling Green, benefits the Sun Belt and Mid-American Conferences; ESPN, which owns and will broadcast it; and Montgomery, which will host it. === MONTGOMERY, Ala. — Downtown in this state’s capital city, the symbols of history are rarely more than a few steps away. It is an easy stroll from the concrete-and-glass Rosa Parks Museum to the red brick Dexter Avenue Baptist Church where Martin Luther King Jr. once preached. Just up the street stands the Alabama state capitol, from which Gov. George C. Wallace fiercely defended segregation — and where thousands of marchers from Selma gathered to demand voting rights nearly 50 years ago. And a half-mile away sits the nearly century-old Cramton Bowl, a 25,000-seat stadium that is home to this week’s made-for-TV Camellia Bowl. Named for Alabama’s state flower, the Camellia Bowl has no history. The game is a creation of The championship semifinals and final in January, which feature the powerhouses Alabama, Florida State, Oregon and Ohio State, are the pinnacle of the college football postseason. The Camellia Bowl, which, in its first year, has matched two also-rans from lower-tier conferences, is closer to the bottom. Not that anyone in Montgomery seems to mind very much. This week, signs heralding the game had popped up on streets, near highway ramps and on downtown buildings. The local TV station, owned by the game’s title sponsor, Raycom Media, eagerly promoted the game in advertisements and reports, and a local sports-talk radio host, Doug Amos, suggested, oddly, given the city’s civil rights history: “I think it’s going to be the biggest event Montgomery has ever had. I don’t think it will ever be topped.” If Amos was hyperbolic about the coming of a bowl to his hometown, Justin Lewis, a running back for George Washington Carver High School, was swayed by more personal reasons. “A football player dreams of playing football,” Lewis said during halftime of a junior varsity basketball game at the school Tuesday night. “And some dream of playing in a bowl.” The Camellia Bowl exists because the Sun Belt and Mid-American Conferences asked for it. The leagues, which compete below the football food chain from their counterparts in the Southeastern and Big Ten Conferences, coveted more bowl tie-ins, and they saw in ESPN a way to get one. ESPN now owns 11 of the country’s 39 bowl games, and broadcasts all but a few of them. “It was in response to a very easy need,” said Karl Benson, the Sun Belt commissioner. “If you look at the number of new bowl games created in the last 18 months, they’ve all been done to accommodate the conferences that have been underserved by the bowl system.” The five new bowls — the Camellia and others in Detroit, Miami, Boca Raton, Fla., and the Bahamas — are unlikely to become historic institutions or add much weight to any record books. “I am not a fan of the expansion of the bowls because it rewards mediocrity and they are often a money-losing proposition for the school,” said David Ridpath, an assistant professor of sports administration at Ohio University. “People can talk about exposure, funding, enrollment, etc., but very little of that, if any, really happens.” Operating on the lower rung of bowls, the Camellia is unlikely to host any great teams. Its debut game features the Bowling Green Falcons (7-6) and the South Alabama Jaguars (6-6). South Alabama was a fortuitous choice for a new bowl in the state: a college in Mobile that started its football program in 2009 The Jaguars and the Falcons are not getting much for their participation: The guaranteed payout of $100,000 a team is a pittance compared with the millions of dollars distributed by prestigious bowls. For South Alabama receiver Shavarez Smith, the business behind the game is secondary to playing in a bowl in only the program’s second year in the Football Bowl Subdivision. “We’re usually home watching other teams play in bowl games,” he said after practice Wednesday at Huntingdon College. “Last year we were 6-6 and bowl eligible, but we didn’t go to a bowl.” The game may not be in Tuscaloosa or Auburn, but the bowl’s organizers believed that a game in Montgomery could benefit from the state’s outsize passion for football. The site of the game, the 25,000-seat Cramton Bowl, Three years ago, the city used more than $20 million in bonds to finance a renovation of the stadium and to build an adjacent indoor sports facility that will be used as an enclosed luxury lounge — called the ESPN Zone — for the game at $150 a ticket. General admission tickets are $20 each. “You’re in a football-crazy part of the world, in a reasonably sized city, and in a city with a long tradition of football around the holidays,” said Jon Steinbrecher, the Mid-American commissioner. There was a certain business symmetry to the genesis of the game beyond the conferences’ fervent desires to line up another bowl to play in. Raycom, which is based in Montgomery, is owned by the powerful Retirement Systems of Alabama, and owns a station in Toledo, Ohio, about 20 miles from Bowling Green, giving it two outlets to publicize the game in the teams’ home markets. Raycom had also sponsored a college football all-star game in Montgomery in January 2013. That game’s organizer, Johnny Williams, “We realize this isn’t Ohio State-Alabama in New Orleans, but we realize Montgomery’s got a perfect location,” said Pete Derzis, The bowl seems less a game than a civic endeavor, a chance at a quick economic boost and a way to show off Montgomery to a prime-time audience, which could be about 2.2 million, based on viewership for the ESPN-owned bowls that were shown on ESPN and ESPNU. It is also a way for Montgomery to pull even with Birmingham and Mobile, which have long had their own bowls. “It’s about community pride,” said Mayor Todd Strange, for whom the game is one item on a list of economic development projects. “It’s about revenue. Mobile says GoDaddy is worth $20 million. That might be on the high side. This year, we think we’ll have a $5 million to $7 million impact.” He conceded that the city was not “awash” in anticipation about the game, but that with corporate purchases of blocks of tickets, the game may be a sellout. “We want to make sure the cameras show that the east side of the stands are full — even if we have to get some cardboard people out there,” Strange said with a smile. Rheba J. Knox, a visitor relations specialist at the Rosa Parks Museum, has tickets to the game but sounded more pleased that the Bowling Green and the South Alabama teams were going to tour the building to learn more about Parks, whose refusal to give up her seat to a white passenger on a city bus in 1955 helped ignite the civil rights movement. “It’s just wonderful that the game is here,” she said after giving a tour to four visitors, “but their coming here will give them a better understanding of what happened here.”