In The News – Unwanted Endings: Teams, conferences & organizers assess the financial damage from canceled bowl games

By Michael Smith of the Sports Business Journal

Five out of 44 college football bowl games were canceled — Arizona, Fenway, Hawaii, Holiday and Military — leading to a game of musical chairs as bowl officials attempted to salvage their events in the face of the omicron variant and spikes in COVID-19 cases.

TRAVEL TALES

College football teams weren’t the only ones inconvenienced during bowl season. The cancellations and uncertainty wrought by COVID-19’s surge were tough on fans, the bands and the bowls. Anthony Travel supplied these travel tales from the just-completed bowl season:

• After arriving in New York for the Pinstripe Bowl, a couple in the Virginia Tech travel party tested positive for COVID-19. Because they couldn’t rejoin the team for the return flight, Anthony Travel secured a New York car service to drive them to Blacksburg, Va., and then return the driver to the city.
  
• Notre Dame’s marching band was supposed to travel to the Fiesta Bowl on Dec. 29, but the night before they were notified by the university that they would no longer be traveling because of COVID concerns. Nearly 400 airline reservations had to be credited that night so that the Irish could apply the value of those tickets to future travel.
  
• SMU athletes were booked to travel from the Dec. 29 Wasabi Fenway Bowl straight to their hometowns in order to expedite their trip home. But when the game got canceled with the Mustangs still in Dallas, every player had to be rebooked from Dallas instead of Boston.

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