In the latest sign that college football’s bowl season will never stop expanding, another legendary baseball stadium is set to host a brand new bowl game starting in 2020.
The bowl season is a long-standing tradition in college football, giving many programs a chance to end their seasons on a winning note and bring a trophy back to campus. The amount of bowls has exploded in recent years as seemingly everyone with a .500 record gets to play in a bowl game, and stadiums around the country want to take part in these moneymaking contests.
And now there will be another bowl game, played in a cold-weather city that no one asked for.
Fenway Park is joining the fray in 2020, with Stadium’s Brett McMurphy reporting that the historic ballpark will play host to the Boston Bowl. Los Angeles and Myrtle Beach are also scheduled to get new bowl games next year, the first in the NCAA’s new bowl cycle.
The Boston Bowl will play host to teams from the ACC and AAC, which makes sense since it is based in the Northeast. Teams like UConn, Temple, Boston College, Syracuse, and Pittsburgh could all bring tremendous fan bases to Fenway Park for the game.
Fenway Park is also the third big league stadium to host a bowl game, joining Yankee Stadium (Pinstripe Bowl) and Arizona’s Chase Field (Cheez-It Bowl). The Pinstripe Bowl, much like the new Boston Bowl, features a team from the ACC every year.
With the three new bowl games, the NCAA will have a whopping 43 bowls (including the national championship game) beginning in 2020, which means that 84 teams will get to play in a postseason game. That is 65 percent of the 130-team FBS sub-division, which seems like an absurdly high number of teams.
Money drives everything, however, and as long as fans want to see college football throughout the country these bowl games will continue to pop up. Having one at Fenway is unique, however, which is more than some of the other random bowls can say.