There's no question in my mind that OU playing in a final four at the FCS level would get more student attention than the Whatever-the-hell Bowl against Troy State. Students and alumni don't care because there's no reason to. At least we'd be playing for something at the FCS level.
How many people can name last year's 1AA final four without looking it up? (I had to.) Or even the final two or the champion? These games are played in the middle of bowl season when all the hype is centered on the 1A teams. Here's a hint: the final eight teams were from Illinois, Iowa, Montana, North Dakota, Tennessee, Utah and Virginia.
And unless we were to finish somewhere in the top eight teams, we would be playing true road games at least past the first round. That would certainly increase our travel costs.
The same number that can tell you who was in the Potato Bowl? Or the Mobile Alabama Bowl that can't keep a consistent sponsor for more than a year?
Here's a better question, of the schools in the final four -- what percentage of their student body could tell you who they played in that final four game? Do you think it's higher or lower than the percentage of OU students that can tell you who we played in the Destination XL Bowl?
As for the true road games, you want to share the economics of our playing a Bowl game in Boise, Mobile, the Bahamas, or Shreveport? Big pay day there? Or does it cost us a couple hundred thousand dollars every time?
My guess is that it cost less to send our team to one bowl game than it would to send them to two or three true road games just to get to the final four. As for the actual percentage of students who could tell us who we played (remember, we're talking about Ohio students, not students at other schools), given that the average student doesn't know who or where we play from week to week during the regular season, I doubt that adding two or three games in December (during or after finals) against teams they probably never heard of (Nicholls State, Weber State, e.g.) would create any more interest among Ohio students.
No question one game costs less than three, but in one scenario here you're paying for three true road games because you're playing for a national championship.
In the other, you're forced to buy a bunch of tickets, pay for travel for a few hundred people to a small, regional city, and put them up in a hotel for a week to get -- consistently -- the lowest ratings of any bowl game.
In 2017, the Bahamas Bowl had 1.3 million viewers. That same year, the FCS Championship game had 1.5 million viewers. The FCS semifinals had another 1 million viewers. Playing in those two games gets you more TV exposure. And, of course, you are playing for something real.
On the other hand, you may well be right that those additional games won't end up leading to more student interest. It's possible that ship's sailed for good. But at least there's a glimmer of hope at the FCS level, right? Where as currently, the gap between P5/G5 is growing, we're not eligible for basically anything that matters, and students and alumni pretty much ignore football. The status quo isn't working -- I tend towards challenging it, in that case.