College football and its bowl season is known for its sponsor names for games, including the Chick-fil-A Bowl and the Poinsettia Bowl, but the new NCAA playoff format that will start after next season will not have any sponsor and will instead be a simple title, like the Final Four in college basketball.
According to ESPN.com, when the officials who oversee the new college football championship format meet to unveil its name and logo in Pasadena, Calif., next month, the title will not include a sponsor name, executive director Bill Hancock said. The report says that the conference commissioners and administrators felt that the playoff should be in the same vein as other big events without title sponsors, such as the Super Bowl and the Masters.
"It won't be 'The Vizio Championship Tournament,'" Hancock said, using the Rose Bowl title sponsor as an example. "The Final Four doesn't have one. The Masters doesn't. The Super Bowl. That's the kind of event we have."
The event itself will have a sponsor, but the actual title of it will not, with Hancock saying that the list of options is a small number and that the name will be classic and not distracting and not cutsey. The news comes just as the NCAA Tournament is basketball is getting started and spring practices are underway around various conferences.
"It's like writing short," said Hancock, a former newspaperman who has enjoyed a long career in collegiate sports administration. "I can write a good long column in 10 minutes. A good short column takes three hours."
The report also says that the regular bowl games like the Orange Bowl and Sugar Bowl will keep their sponsor names.
"The semifinals will have something to the effect of 'The Football Tournament Semifinal at the Discover Orange Bowl,'" he said.
The news about the name came out just as Notre Dame and the Big East figured out an agreement that would allow the Irish to move to the ACC in July. The school and the conference agreed on a $2.5 million exit fee, but based on past dealings between the Irish and the Big East in regards to the league's exit and entrance fee revenues, the school will not have to pay, according to ESPN.com.
The Irish will be moving all teams to the conference except for football, which has traditionally been independent. The team will play ACC opponents over the next few years and will be looking to stay playing strong in 2013 after making it the BCS Championship game against Alabama.