Saturday, August 10, 2013

"Legends Bowl" game in Charleston?

In Saturday, August 10's edition of the Post and Courier, there was an article by Jeff Hartsell about a possible new bowl game to be held in Charleston beginning in 2014. The article has more info about the imitative. http://www.postandcourier.com/article/20130810/PC16/130819924/1177/new-effort-to-bring-bowl-game-to-charleston-faces-familiar-obstacles-confederate-flag-naacp-ncaa

The article discusses the stance that the NCAA and the NAACP has towards the Confederate flag in South Carolina, who could be against this endeavor.

Georgia Southern-Citadel game from last season.
Photo from Nick Hartley
The game would pit Mid-American Conference and Sun Belt Conference foes in the Legends Bowl and would be held on December 20, 2014. The game would air on the NBC Sports Network.

The bowl game has looked at many cities. According to a Jon Solomon article from AL.com, they've looked at Montgomery, Alabama: http://www.al.com/sports/index.ssf/2013/06/proposed_montgomery_bowl_game.html

The June 15 article says that Brian Woods, a New York sports consultant heading the Legends Bowl Group, said the organization is in active talks with NBC and smaller conferences such as the Sun Belt, Mountain West, MAC and Conference USA.

The game would be held at Johnson-Hagood Stadium near The Citadel campus. The stadium currently seats 21,000 fans, and was renovated back in 2006.

A bowl game, IMO, would be a good idea for the Charleston area to pursue. It is during a barren part of the year for tourism, late December, just before Christmas.

During December, you have college basketball, the Stingrays (minor league hockey), and not much else sports wise. The bowl game would fill a void locally. A problem may be how far away some of the teams in the two conferences are from Charleston. The two leagues, according to the AL.com article, would get 3,000-4,000 tickets each. The stadium is small for a bowl game, but several bowl have drawn close to or less than what this game may draw.

Here are the distances between the different teams in the MAC and Sun Belt to Johnson-Hagood Stadium:

MAC:

East Division
Northern Illinois- 969 miles
Ball State- 726 miles
Western Michigan- 930 miles
Central Michigan- 950 miles
Eastern Michigan- 819 miles
Toledo- 776 miles

West Division
Bowling Green- 752 miles
Kent State- 696 miles
Akron- 685 miles
Miami (OH)- 659 miles
Ohio University- 559 miles
Buffalo- 871 miles
UMass- 922 miles

Sun Belt:

Georgia Southern- 152 miles
Appalachian State- 300 miles
Georgia State- 318 miles
Troy- 510 miles
Western Kentucky- 586 miles
South Alabama- 643 miles
Arkansas State- 770 miles
Louisiana-Monroe- 815 miles
Louisiana-Lafayette- 893 miles
Texas State- 1,268 miles
New Mexico State- 1,776 miles
Idaho- 2,748 miles

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