The 2017 Hawaii Bowl will go where few college football bowl games have dared, deep into the mighty NFL’s shadow on a Sunday.
After assiduously avoiding Sundays for nearly a decade precisely because of NFL overload, the Hawaii Bowl will tee it up this year smack dab in the middle of it on Dec. 24.
While the Christmas Eve slot has become a fixture for the game, it will be only the third time in the Hawaii Bowl’s 16 years that the game is to be played on a Sunday and first time since 2007.
Significantly, of the 35-game bowl lineup for the 2017-18 season announced Wednesday by ESPN and ABC, only the Hawaii Bowl is boldly — or desperately — attempting to carve a niche on Sunday.
While the Hawaii Bowl is not currently scheduled to go head to head with any of the pro games, it will be the caboose on a long day of 12 NFL games.
To put some distance between the last of them, Seattle-Dallas and the New York Giants-Arizona on Fox and San Francisco-Jacksonville on CBS, the Hawaii Bowl is even pushing its kickoff back a half hour to 3:30 p.m., 8:30 p.m. on the East Coast in what is termed “a TV decision.”
How many people will be turned to the TV on the continent at those hours on Christmas Eve is anybody’s guess. Especially with several of its top markets on the East Coast.
“We’ll be the only game on (at that point), the only college game on, and there are people out there who are big college fans,” said Daryl Garvin, director of the Hawaii Bowl.
Locally, it means the Hawaii Bowl will need an appearance by a successful University of Hawaii team and a compelling American Athletic Conference opponent more than ever if it is to pry ticket-buying customers away from Christmas Eve festivities.
The fact is the Hawaii Bowl and its owners had few decent options the way this year’s over-stuffed bowl calendar shook out.
The game could have taken Monday, Christmas Day, when it would have bucked not only Santa Claus but gone helmet to helmet with Monday Night Football’s Oakland-Philadelphia game.
Backing up a day to Saturday wasn’t much better. That would have meant being the last of four bowls that day and bumping up against the Vikings-Packers in the same time slot.
As for other scenarios, there apparently weren’t any for a game that that is owned and operated by ESPN Events, which also runs the Diamond Head Classic in tandem, Dec. 22, 23 and 25, at the Stan Sheriff Center.
In the glut of postseason bowls, ESPN is the major player, owning 13 and having the TV rights to 24 games overall to shoehorn in between Dec. 19 and Dec. 30, leaving scant flexibility.
Going up against the NBA and NHL for viewership on occasion is one thing. Attempting to tackle the NFL is something else. The importance of avoiding a direct time slot collision with the NFL was underlined by what happened last year when, for all the offensive fireworks in UH’s 52-35 shootout victory over Middle Tennessee State, the game drew only 1.35 million viewers and a 0.7 rating, its lowest in at least a decade.
Meanwhile, the Cincinnati-Houston game on the NFL Network attracted 6.3 million viewers, according to Nielsen ratings.
As Pete Derzis, ESPN Events’ senior vice president, put it after last year’s numbers came out, “The NFL is so dominant that whenever you go head to head with the NFL, it is not a winning proposition.”
But it turns out that avoiding the behemoth’s shadow isn’t all that easy, either.
