^ I agree with you about the Holiday Bowl...but...
the Capital One (hasn't been Citrus in over 10 years) Bowl had 56,600 fans in a stadium that holds 65,000
the Outback Bowl had 51,000 fans in a stadium that holds 66,000
the Gator is listing 60,700 tickets distributed, but being there I can tell you that maybe 40,000 showed up
ticket prices for the Capital One and Outback are higher than the Gator...and payouts for both games are MUCH higher than the Gator Bowl
put it this way...SEC top team goes to BCS (Sugar), then Capital One, Outback, Cotton, Chick-Fil-A, and then Gator...and the Big 10 goes BCS (Rose), Capital One, Outback, Buffalo Wild Wings, and then Gator.
Check your facts...while Cap One payout is higher by ~1M, Outback is Lower by 1M. In fact Gator payout is a little higher than Cotton. Gator has the 3rd highest non-BCS payout, the new contract will be better for the Gator and having TaxSlayer.com sign on to sponsor for another 6 years will only help....
http://www.statisticbrain.com/college-bowl-game-payouts/
Yeah, people really need to check their facts. In addition to the payout being competitive *all* of those attendance figures are "tickets distributed", and the Gator Bowl beat both the Capital One and Outback Bowl and a lot of others.
For comparison, of the BCS bowls, the Fiesta Bowl attracted
65,172, the Orange Bowl had
72,080 and the Rose Bowl as usual blew them all out of the water with
95,173. Of the other 2nd-tier bowls, the Peach Bowl (sorry, the "Chick-fil-A Bowl") drew
67,946, the Cotton Bowl drew
72,690, and the Alamo Bowl drew
65,918. None of the others I know of (Holiday Bowl, Russel Athletic, Sun Bowl, etc) cracked 60k. They're not nearly so far behind as the doom and gloom crowd seems to believe.
As for the perceived decline of the Gator and similar bowls, you can blame that directly on the rise of the BCS and the conference ties, and more recently declining interest in bowl games. Still, the Gator Bowl has always been resilient. They made a strong showing with the old ACC-Big East tie-in with a high selection, but obviously they had to move away as those conferences declined (and the Big East collapsed). Now they're on with the SEC, Big 10 and ACC, though they've had to start lower in the totem pole. But the GBA clearly knows what it takes to be competitive and are taking the steps to get there.
