The ACC announced some new bowl affiliations, starting in the 2020 season. The conference will be cutting ties with the Quick Lane Bowl based at Ford Field in Detroit, Michigan and the Independence Bowl based at Independence Stadium in Shreveport, Louisiana at the end of this season.
In place of those two bowls, the ACC will now be sending teams to San Diego, California for the SDCCU Holiday Bowl and the currently unnamed bowl game that will be held at Fenway Park in Boston, Massachusetts. These agreements will extend until the end of the 2025 season.
🚨 Bowl agreements through 2025 have been announced!
👉 https://t.co/b5HVNBX6cz pic.twitter.com/m0JYEI2nId
— ACC Football (@ACCFootball) July 11, 2019
With the move, the ACC has completely moved out of the interior of the country. The most inland bowl now will be the Birmingham Bowl, and most of the bowl games will be within a short drive of the coast.
This is a net positive for the ACC. The bowl games in Detroit and Shreveport have routinely had below average attendance, while the Holiday Bowl has never seen its attendance below 44,000 people. The new bowl game in Fenway Park is likely to have solid attendance numbers as well since the Pinstripe Bowl in Yankee Stadium averages about 40,000 fans.
These moves give the ACC 10 guaranteed bowl bids per season. That will make it easier for bowl eligible teams to find a suitable landing spot after the conference had to do some juggling in 2018. Of the conference’s 14 full members, 11 won the six games needed to become bowl eligible with the exceptions being Florida State, Louisville, and North Carolina.
Notre Dame is a partial member of the conference, and the Fighting Irish are part of the ACC bowl tie-ins too. In terms of selection order, they are not allowed to be chosen over any team that has two more wins than them, but they can be chosen over teams with just one more win than the Irish.
H/T ACC Network
