When you find someone who says things like "The Camellia Bowl is a helluva thing," and "The Bahamians are starting to learn about college football, and they like it," you must find time for the conversation.
Wright Waters accommodated.
Some people may like college football bowl games more than Waters, but nobody advocates for the bowl concept like Waters.
"They so unique and so important to the success of college football," Waters said.
Now, Waters has to say such things as executive director of the College Bowl Association, which promotes the 40 postseason games that begin with a six-pack on Saturday.
But his bowl belief is genuine and comes from a good place. Waters grew up in Alabama, and his family attended Crimson Tide bowl games when he was young.
"You could feel how different a bowl game was from a regular-season game, how special it was," Waters said.
He noticed the same thing once Waters got into athletic administration. He was working at Southern Mississippi in the 1970s, and if November came around and the Golden Eagles weren't headed to a bowl game, "you could shoot a shotgun in the stands and not hit anybody," Waters said.
Waters became commissioner of the Sun Belt, helping to grow that conference and expand its bowl opportunities. Two months after he retired from that job in 2012, he accepted the CBA position and now works from his home.
The job isn't to be the bowl boss but to troubleshoot and promote. Bowls are traditional, important to the host cities that count on the tourist dollars, charitable, and provide entertainment. ESPN owns and operates about one-third of the bowl games and televises all but a handful.
It's not a perfect system. You'll see plenty of empty seats, silly sponsor names _ the Bad Boy Mowers Gasparilla Bowl in St. Petersburg, Fla., is this year's winner _ and the word "meaningless" associated with most of the games up until New Year's Day.
Waters gets it.
"You can't compare everything to the Rose Bowl, Cotton Bowl and Sugar Bowl," Waters said. "Those aren't the purpose for a lot of the games."
That purpose, Waters said, is what we've long heard about bowl game advantages. Teams get an extra month of practice, players get bowl swag, the schools' official traveling party gets a few days usually in a nice city on the bowl-payout dime, television gets live events, and if you're really good _ like LSU's Leonard Fournette and Stanford's Christian McCaffrey last year (and expect more this year) _ you can opt out of playing.
"The bowls had a marketing expression a few years ago: 'Everybody wins,' " Waters said. "I'd say that's still the case."
