If Beef O’Brady’s can have its own bowl game, why not Bitcoin?
The Beef O’Brady’s Bowl is now the Bitcoin St. Petersburg Bowl. The digital currency owns naming rights through 2016.
So how many bitcoins did BitPay pay to sponsor the game? Last season, Beef O’Brady’s spent around $375,000 to put its name on the the nearly seven-year-old bowl game. Currently, traders value a bitcoin at around $600. So, BitPay coughed up roughly 630 bitcoins for naming rights. One guesses the bowl committee asked for cash, check, or some more traditional form of payment, though.
The game plays as one of 39 postseason college bowl games this coming season. Like currency, bowl games lose their value when too many flood the market. The Bitcoin St. Petersburg Bowl competes with such contests as the Taxslayer Bowl, Fight Hunger Bowl, and GoDaddy Bowl for the attention of distracted college football fans around the holidays.
The made-for-cable-TV contest, staged since 2008 at Tropicana Field, normally features a team from the American Athletic Conference against a Conference USA or Atlantic Coast Conference team–or basically whatever school they can coax into playing. In its short history, three .500 teams have competed in the bowl.
Last season, Eastern Carolina defeated Ohio 37-20 in the pre-Christmas game.