FSU Football: Why Tallahassee should host future bowl game

FSU football is watching the bowl season from home, but when they are playing in one in the future their home stadium should be hosting a game.

During the first day alone of the 2018 college football bowl season – you know, that thing FSU football used to take part in – five bowl games took place that included games being played inside college football stadiums and in cities with populations near the size of what Tallahassee has to offer.

In a growing bowl world where there are now going to be 40 games (including the national title game) involving teams from the FBS level. there is no reason why one of those games should not be played inside Doak Campbell Stadium in the future.

While there is a perception that Tallahassee is this small town that just happens to be a state capital, there are actually four cities that host bowl games with a smaller population than the home of FSU football (Annapolis, Boca Raton, Frisco and Mobile) and four other cities with less than 85,000 more (Boise, Montgomery, Nassau and Shreveport).

It also wouldn’t be out of the ordinary for a stadium that hosts a college football team to host a bowl game as 19 of the current 39 FBS bowl games are being played in stadiums that are the home to a college football team during the 2018 season.

Of those eight cities above that I mentioned, I can understand having a game in Boca Raton since it gets cold weather fans to a warm weather climate – same thing for Nassau and maybe even Mobile since it’s on Florida’s Gulf Coast – and Frisco is close enough to a big city like Dallas that it can attract fans and teams.

But you can not tell me that it is better for college football to have a game played in December in Idaho or Montgomery as opposed to the home of the FSU football team. Hell, you can argue there is no reason a bowl game should be played in a city of under 40,000 people like Annapolis but not in the state capital of the third largest state in the country.

If the ACC was smart, they would work out a way to get one of their bowls they are currently tied into moved to Tallahassee – with the best bet being that Military Bowl, where they could convince the American Athletic Conference that it’s better to be playing in Florida than in cold Maryland in December.

After the FSU football season is over, Doak Campbell Stadium traditionally sits empty until the annual spring game and again until the following season – so why not bring a little more money in and turn the lights on once more for college football?