The eagerly anticipated inaugural Barstool Sports Arizona Bowl has been cancelled. The cancellation was due to a Covid spike within a participating athletic program. Furthermore, Barstool thanked their conference partners and sponsors for their support. The sports media brand says they are looking “forward to providing a world class bowl experience in 2022”.
Central Michigan’s Chippewas team had already arrived in the desert for the game. The other team in the bowl, the Boise State Broncos, backed out. Specifically, they withdrawed due to COVID-19 cases within the program.
“We feel for the young men in our program who were very much looking forward to closing out their season, and for some, their football careers,” Broncos athletic director Jeramiah Dickey said in the statement posted via Twitter.
This becomes just the latest in a spate of bowl games that have either been cancelled, or are in danger of being cancelled because of the spread of COVID-19 cases across the country as the omicron variant continues to spike.
Barstool founder, Dave Portnoy, showed off some of the Arizona Bowl gear.
Portnoy also took aim at a local sports radio host who reveled in the cancellation. Sports radio’s Brian Rice said the cancellation “is the type of rich irony that only college football can dish out.”
Portnoy responded with “Every one of these clowns is the same. Jealous nobodies who take shots at us from the clouds. Then cry when I call em out. Everyday we get stronger. Tomorrow we will be stronger. The day after that stronger.10 years from now stronger. He’ll still be a nobody crying about us.”
Furthermore Portnoy pointed to his work helping small businesses during the worst of the Covid pandemic.
The bowl game was to be Barstool’s first big time live sports broadcast. “We are getting into the live sports broadcast game,” Barstool head Dave Portnoy announced in July. Portnoy relished having control of the entire event, including the national anthem and halftime show.
We’ll have to wait another year to see the game that was set to transform the traditional bowl game presentation.
