Bowl season is full of festive excitement. The teams get to travel to exotic and distant locales like Frisco, TX or Annapolis, MD to put on an exhibition game, all in the name of charity and giving, and the holiday spirit. Corporate sponsorships abound, with ad money flowing as freely as the booze on the golf courses and in the shiny retail bars of the host city all week, and it makes one wonder if everyone is really in it for the giving, or if it is for the party and the tax write off.
All the D1 bowl games were sorted and based upon the author’s opinion, assigned an Evil Score and a Stupid Score. The scale is 0-5, with 0 being the least problematic, and 5 being the most problematic. Please keep in mind, this ranking is opinion-based and all in good fun.
First, our unproblematic king – Dukes Mayo. Great product, hilarious brand voice, and fan-owned. What’s not to love?
Next, the probably fine group:
| Gator Bowl | TaxSlayer | These guys seem pretty great, tbh. Software for handling taxes for freelancers. |
| Las Vegas Bowl | SRS Distribution | Got nothing. Building supply distribution is tame enough apparently. |
| New Orleans Bowl | R+L Carriers | Logistics is a nightmare, and these guys at least seem to pay well. |
| Texas Bowl | TaxAct | These guys also seem okay, as far as tax preparers go. |
| Gasparilla Bowl | Union Home Mortgage | A good mortgage company? Hell, yeah! |
| Pinstripe Bowl | New Era | Hats are fine. |
| First Responder Bowl | Servpro | What’s this, a corporation that seems to provide a solid service? |
| Camellia Bowl | TaxAct | These guys also seem okay, as far as tax preparers go. |
| Frisco Bowl | Tropical Smoothie Cafe | Mmm. Mango smoothie. |
| Myrtle Beach Bowl | None | No sponsor, no points. |
| Fenway Bowl | Wasabi | Some startup cloud storage company. |
| LA Bowl | Jimmy Kimmel | This is fine. Better than Barstool by miles anyway. |
| Bahamas Bowl | None | No sponsor, no points. RIP Popeyes. |
| Hawaii Bowl | EasyPost | Another startup. Postage as a service? |
Kinda Sketchy:
| Liberty Bowl | AutoZone | Get in the zone, but only if you need a generic part and don’t want to wait for shipping and don’t have an O’Reilly’s close. |
| Holiday Bowl | San Diego County Credit Union | Apparently Yelp is mad about their service, so they get a stupid point. But Credit Unions > Banks all day. |
| Music City Bowl | TransPerfect | They get a stupid point for dumb corporate infighting to the point where the court liquidated the company. |
| Outback Bowl | Outback | As far as massive restaurant companies go, this one seems decent. 1 evil point for still having servers out there getting minimum. |
| Fiesta Bowl | PlayStation | Sony, unfortunately, has a baseline bc tech company, but is a pretty good one! |
| Quick Lane Bowl | Ford | Ford: We’re way less evil than we could be. |
| Birmingham Bowl | TicketSmarter | 1 stupid point for the ticket reseller concept, and 1 stupid point for partnering with the Mountain West for some reason. |
| New Mexico Bowl | PUBG Mobile | This sponsorship is stupid because just reinvest the profits back into the company and employees instead of advertising to the 25 fans of whoever is playing in this game. |
| Cotton Bowl Classic | Goodyear | Goodyear isn’t especially bad, but get points for contributions to both climate change and keeping the gender pay gap going. |
| Cure Bowl | Tailgreeter | No, pls don’t monetize hanging out at a tailgate, ya fucks. |
Sus:
| Guaranteed Rate Bowl | Guaranteed Rate | Mortgage companies get a baseline of 2, but these guys got an extra point for having to pay fines over being shady idiots. |
| Boca Raton Bowl | RoofClaim.com | Door-to-door sales solicitation? No thanks. |
| Peach Bowl | Chick-fil-A | Quit giving the hateful chicken people your money. Popeyes is better anyway. |
| Sun Bowl | Tony the Tiger (Kellogg’s) | Kelloggs loosed corn flakes on the world on the theory that having breakfast without substance would keep people from masturbating. They’ve improved their thinking since, but what the hell was that? |
| Cheez-It Bowl | Cheez-It (Kellogg’s) | See Tony the Tiger |
| Rose Bowl Game | Capital One | Banks have a natural evil/stupid level of 3, especially when built on 20+% interest consumer credit. That being said, when Capitol one isn’t looking the other way on money laundering, they at least have pledged recently to stop charging consumer fees. |
| Orange Bowl | Capital One | Banks have a natural evil/stupid level of 3, especially when built on 20+% interest consumer credit. That being said, when Capitol one isn’t looking the other way on money laundering, they at least have pledged recently to stop charging consumer fees. |
| Sugar Bowl | Allstate | Insurance companies also get a naturally elevated evil/stupid level, and it would make sense for Allstate to advertise a little less and pay out more claims. Alas, the Cotton Bowl and commercials played until we hate them. |
| Alamo Bowl | Valero | Petrochemical company? Sus is Baseline. |
Finally, the most problematic:
| LendingTree Bowl | LendingTree | This mortgage company’s CEO got nailed taking 40m bucks. |
| Independence Bowl | Radiance Technologies | Defense contractors get max evil points and 2 stupid points for existing. |
| Armed Forces Bowl | Lockheed Martin | Defense contractors get max evil points and 2 stupid points for existing. |
| Military Bowl | Peraton | Defense contractors get max evil points and 2 stupid points for existing. |
| Citrus Bowl | Vrbo | Vrbo is owned by Expedia. This score is solely on the strength of what a pain booking things through them is, and the endless accounts of a bad refund process when needing to cancel. |
| Famous Idaho Potato Bowl | Idaho Potato Commission | Folksy commercials with a red truck are cute. A complete stranglehold on the politics of a state is not. |
| Arizona Bowl | Barstool Sports | Barstool is a purveyor of bottom-feeder content. Their leaders create a culture of misogyny and spread it to the masses for the revenue, and frankly, none of it is as funny as they think. Also, Dave Portnoy is a paper-handed bitch. 💎 |