Courtesy USA Today

(December 8, 2010) ESPN/ABC's near-monopoly on college bowls — it owns seven and will air a record 33 of the 35 bowls, all except Fox's Cotton Bowl and CBS' Sun Bowl — means it tries to create a three-week miniseries where each game leads to another.

And for the first time, it will try to create a TV roadblock starting at noon ET on Jan. 1 with four overlapping bowls on ABC, ESPN, ESPN2 and the first bowl on ESPNU (Northwestern-Texas Tech in the TicketCity Bowl). Other wrinkles:

•Three bowls — the Jan. 6 GoDaddy.com Bowl, Jan. 8 BBVA Compass Bowl and Jan. 9 Kraft Fight Hunger Bowl — between the BCS bowls and the title game. Says ESPN programmer Dave Brown: "Obviously we didn't want to go off-the-air with football leading up to the championship."

•ESPN's NFL voices calling TV bowls for the first time, including Stanford-Virginia Tech in the Jan. 3 Discover Orange Bowl, letting Ron Jaworski and Jon Gruden ponder the potential NFL top draft pick — Stanford's Andrew Luck.

•Two female bowl game announcers —Pam Ward on the Dec. 29 Military Bowl and Beth Mowins on the Dec. 30 Bell Helicopter Armed Forces Bowl and — for the first time.

•More obscure title sponsors — the BBVA Compass Bowl, The Bridgeport Education Holiday Bowl, the AdvoCare 100 Independence Bowl — than ever. Every brand has to start somewhere.

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