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Mids could play in new D.C. bowl game in 2008

Although Navy’s football team will fly across the country later this month to play in San Diego’s Poinsettia Bowl, players could have only a 45-minute bus ride this time next year, if plans go forward to create a new bowl game in Washington, D.C.

The District of Columbia Bowl Commission has until April 1 to submit a proposal to the National Collegiate Athletic Association’s bowl certifying board, said Marie Rudolph, one of the commission’s two principals. The NCAA will look at game sites, conferences tie-ins and corporate sponsorship before deciding whether to approve the game.

If the plan is approved, the inaugural Congressional Bowl will be held next December at either the new Washington Nationals baseball stadium or RFK Stadium, the Washington Redskins’ former stadium, both of which are less than an hour drive from the Naval Academy’s Annapolis, Md., campus.

Naval Academy Athletic Director Chet Gladchuck told the Naval Academy Board of Visitors on Monday that Navy has tentatively agreed to host the first Congressional Bowl.

The commission is negotiating with the U.S. Military Academy, in West Point, N.Y., to host the 2009 game, Rudolph said.

Rudolph said service academies will play against a civilian university, probably from either the Big East or Atlantic Coast Conference.

Deputy Athletic Director Eric Ruden said the bowl could rotate among service academies in subsequent years, but he added that the Air Force Academy could be a difficult fit in years when its team does well, because it already has a conference tie-in to the Las Vegas Bowl because it plays in the Mountain West conference.

Ruden said he doubted that a bowl bid would be automatically given to the service academy that has the best record against other academies because a similar agreement two decades ago to send the best service academy football team to the Liberty Bowl in Memphis failed.

“Air Force won the Commander-in-Chief’s trophy each of the years the agreement was in place,” Ruden said. “When it came time to renew the contract, the Liberty Bowl was not interested because no bowl wants to get the same team in consecutive years because it’s very difficult to get fans to travel to the same place in consecutive years.”

Instead, commission principal Sean Metcalf said he would like to see service academies rotate every three years. In years when the school in line is not bowl-eligible, a second civilian university would be invited, he said.

Whichever service academy plays in the Congressional Bowl, Ruden said, the Washington area will be a good place for it because of the area’s large concentration of service academy alumni, its large number of military installations and many tourist attractions. But it will be even better for Navy because the Naval Academy is nearby.

“Washington is a great city, very close to Annapolis,” Ruden said. “The activities that can take place leading up to the game would be just fantastic. That’s a lot of what goes into a bowl game. You have got the game, but you have also got four or five days leading up the game.”

Although Ruden conceded that most bowl games are played in warm-weather cities in order to avoid snow and low temperatures, he said that northern cities such as Toronto and Detroit have hosted indoor bowl games in recent years, and other cities that experience less severe winter weather, such as Charlotte, N.C. and Dallas, have hosted outdoor bowl games.

“We played a bowl game in Charlotte last year,” he said. “The weather in Charlotte is not that different from D.C. this time of year.”

Rudolph said no decision has been made on a payout to Congressional Bowl participants. But paychecks for this year’s bowls range from $300,000 per team for the Papa Johns.com Bowl to $17 million per team for each of the five Bowl Championship Series games.