The Outback Bowl remains a New Year’s Day winner. It sells out; it garners good ratings; it showcases the Tampa Bay area; and it provides marquee match-ups – witness this year’s Penn State-Tennessee pairing. And in the ever-evolving, naming-rights game, it even sounds like a bowl game.
Which is no gimme these days.
Increasingly, bowl games have been going exclusively with corporate sponsors. As in the Meineke Car Care Bowl, the Chick-fil-A Bowl and the Papajohns.com Bowl.
But Outback works. It connotes athletic and rugged – not just a restaurant chain.
Actually, the first draft – back in 1996 – was “Outback Steakhouse Bowl.”
Sometimes you add by subtracting.