End of the road for the Houston Bowl?

So maybe Houston just wasn't meant to host a college bowl game. First we had the Bluebonnet Bowl, which lasted from 1959 to 1987 and eventually withered because of dropping ticket sales and the lack of a corporate sponsor. Fast-forward about 20 years, and Houston's latest foray into the college postseason — the Houston Bowl — may be about to meet the same fate.

The Houston Bowl began life in 2000 as the galleryfurniture.com Bowl. In 2002, Internet provider EV1.net signed on as the corporate sponsor, a deal that ended last year. Now, the bowl is still sponsorless and still owes money to the Big 12 and Mountain West conferences, which participated in the 2005 game. The Houston Bowl has never drawn big crowds — the average attendance for the six games is 41,276, and the 2004 Colorado-UTEP game had the smallest crowd of all, 27,235. Officials blame the bowl's problems on the game date, in the middle of the last week of December, and a lack of community support.

So the 28 NCAA-affiliated bowls are set for review soon, and if the Houston Bowl doesn't get its problems worked out, it's not likely to be renewed. Possible solutions include reducing the game's $2.4 million payout and, of course, finding another corporate sponsor.