The [Please Go Viral] Bowl Presented By [Watch This Crazy Stunt]
Is the expanded College Football Playoff to blame for bowl season’s growing absurdity?
Welcome back to Club Sportico, where we break down the intersection of sports and money—with an extra bit of humor and opinion. Today, Eben admits defeat…
I had a crazy experience this week. I spent most of Saturday and Sunday loudly complaining to anyone who would listen, ‘Why don’t we have a college football bowl game trophy that's ALSO a toaster??’. Then I woke up Monday morning and my prayers were answered.
The Pop-Tarts Bowl, building off the virality of last year’s edible mascot, is taking the absurdity one step further for this year’s game. On Monday the bowl’s organizers unveiled a new trophy that perfectly embodies social media’s two-pronged blend of pointless marketing idiocy and uber-memeable brilliance. The game trophy now plugs into the wall and weighs 77 pounds ☹️. It can also toast a Pop-Tart! 🥳
I am, of course, joking about my weekend. There are 8 billion people on earth and not a single one is asking for this. I'd bet no one even had the thought until whoever pitched it in a Pop-Tarts advertising meeting at some point in the last 12 months.
But as much I hate nearly everything about it, I also have to admit the undeniable: it works. The Pop-Tarts Bowl has become an instant case study for marketing executives across the country, likely both jealous and confused about how something this stupid could be this successful.
The X post announcing the new trophy got 3.5 million views and more than 2,200 retweets. Most of the college football journalists and personalities I follow weighed in as well. There were more than 275 print and digital articles written about the trophy, according to Apex Marketing Group, and the total media coverage garnered nearly $1.5 million in exposure.
Pop-tarts are also flying off the shelves, which I hope is a coincidence but I actually believe is not.1 Kellanova’s stock is up about 45% since the 2023 game, and Pop-Tarts is the group’s third most profitable snack brand, behind Pringles and Cheez-It. The company’s snack sales jumped 10% last year to nearly $4.1 billion, and Pop-Tarts make up about 25% of that total. Perhaps most notably, in the eight weeks after last year’s bowl game, the company sold 21 million more of the toaster pastries than it had in the previous eight weeks.
“Ultimately, what a brand like Pop-Tarts cares about is sales,” Alex Sotiropoulos, the company’s brand manager, said earlier this month at a Sports Business Journal conference. “The impressions, the viewership numbers, the broadcast exposure, all of that really matters a lot, but how it translates [to sales] is what’s most important.”
Here’s how absurd things have become. Peach Bowl CEO Gary Stokan told me in a phone call earlier this week that his bowl game, as part of its long-standing deal with Chick-fil-A, is planning to “have a cow rappel from the top of Mercedes-Benz Stadium to deliver the game ball.” I heard the words and kept chatting as if everything was normal. Sure, I thought, dropping a 3,000-pound animal from the roof of a stadium seems like the next logical step. It wasn’t until later in the conversation that I realized he was actually talking about a human in a cow costume.
But how am I to tell the difference between real and ludicrous this bowl season? The Holiday Bowl recently hired competitive eating legend Joey Chestnut as its—and I’m not making this up—"chief eggnog official." Chestnut will dump eggy liquid on the game’s winning coach.
That’s not to be confused with the Duke’s Mayo Bowl, which dumps a different eggy liquid on its winning coach. That happens while a dancing mayo jar with bushy eyebrows rattles with approval 👇. The dueling Cheez-It mascots, inexplicably named Prince Cheddward and Ched-Z, are back this year; as is Spuddy Buddy, the dancing tuber from the Famous Idaho Potato Bowl.
Stokan has a theory about how we got here. The expansion of the college football title chase, first to four teams and now to 12, has left a bunch of mid-tier bowls (and their sponsors) fighting for relevance. These games are a fun perk for students, but they work financially only in as much as people watch them on TV and talk about them on social media. Without that, the businesses make no sense.
“They have to do something to break through the clutter to make them relevant in this marketplace, because with a 12-team playoff, you can see most of the media is going in that direction,” Stokan said. “So if you’re going to be in that business, the mayos, and the Pop-Tarts, and the Cheez-Its all have to be creative.”
Some day soon they’ll be rappelling actual cows. Mark my words.
Jacob’s ⚡️ Take: I’m blaming social media for all this silliness. The universal embrace of short-form video untethered from any chronological timeline has only boosted the value of a successful stunt. Football moments trend for a day or two; memes live forever. (But Club Sportico will fold before I let someone dump mayo on me.)
If you missed our note on Monday, we’re doing a College Football Playoff pool for this new 12-team bracket. Here are the rules:
- You must sign up before the Notre Dame-Indiana game Friday night.
- Pick your bracket all the way through the winner.
- You get 75 points per correct pick in the first round, 75 points per correct pick in the quarterfinals, 150 points per correct pick in the semis, and 300 points for having the correct champion.
We’re giving away two small prizes: One for the highest finishing paid Club Sportico member, and another for the best team name, as determined by Jacob.
Again, picks lock on Friday before the first game. Join us! We’ll share an update after the first round.
Programming Note: The Pick Six will now be a separate email, in your inbox every Saturday AM.
Club Sportico is a community organized by Sportico, a digital media company launched in 2020 to cover the business side of sports. You can read breaking news, smart analysis, and in-depth features from Eben, Jacob and their colleagues at Sportico.com, and listen to the Sporticast podcast wherever you get your audio. Contact us at club@sportico.com.
Jerry Seinfeld’s bizarre Pop-Tarts movie likely didn’t hurt either.