COLLEGE FOOTBALL SPOTLIGHT : GEE, WHAT A SURPRISE FOLKS PASSED UP THIS ONE

Sugar Bowl officials, who originally said their decision to choose Texas over Florida State to play in their game was motivated in part by financial reasons, are scurrying for new explanations after Sunday’s debacle.

Sugar Bowl executive director Troy Mathieu is blaming a bad marketing program for the smallest Sugar Bowl crowd since the game moved to the Superdome 20 years ago. With as many as 3,000 tickets unsold, an estimated $300,000 loss in revenue is possible. Attendance was announced at 70,263 in a facility that seats 77,814.

“We had some empty seats, but there were a lot of reasons for it,” Mathieu said. “We had a marketing program that did not take off he way we expected it to. And not having an SEC team cost us some regional support.”

What cost the Sugar Bowl was a horrible matchup between two teams with little appeal outside Austin, Texas, and Blacksburg, Va., much less New Orleans.

Florida State had trouble selling its Orange Bowl allotment, but one has to think a trip to New Orleans would have been more appealing to Seminole fans than yet another jaunt to Miami.

And not in yet are television ratings that certainly are expected to reflect the attendance drop. The matchup was originally described as a “ratings winner” by an ABC spokesman.

One harkens back to this comment from Virginia Tech media relations director Jack Williams in early December: “We only get 15,000 tickets, but we figure we could sell 25,000 if they could get them for us.”

Maybe Mathieu suffered only from a shipping problem.