College football already has an Orange Bowl, a Peach Bowl, and a Citrus Bowl, so on its face, there’s nothing outlandish about the concept of an Onion Bowl.
But this matchup wouldn’t be titled to evoke some locale’s bumper crop, à la the Famous Idaho Potato Bowl. Instead it would market “America’s Finest News Source,” The Onion. (Today’s top headlines: Bain Capital Acquires Tibetan Buddhism For $35 Million; Abdul El-Sayed Makes History As First Physically Healthy Senator; Chuck Schumer Delivers Victory Speech To Previously Enthusiastic Crowd.)
On Thursday morning, Onion CEO (and past Nieman Lab contributor) Ben Collins announced the publication’s quest to buy naming rights for a bowl game, both on Bluesky and on the podcast Pablo Torre Finds Out:
Some VERY big, fun news:
The Onion is extremely close to buying an honest-to-goodness, Division 1 college football bowl series bowl game.
Yes, we're trying to pull off The Onion Bowl.
A few days before Christmas, potentially in Texas.
But we've already been banned once. And we need your help.
— Ben Collins (@bencollins.bsky.social) November 5, 2026 at 8:32 AM
For those unfamiliar, American college football seasons traditionally end with a few dozen bowl games, scattered around the country (and occasionally outside it). Nearly all of these games sell naming rights to one company or another, leading to fun combinations like the Poulan Weed Eater Independence Bowl, the TaxSlayer.com Gator Bowl, and the Union Home Mortgage Gasparilla Bowl. Collins wants to buy the rights to one of the several bowl games that are still without a sponsor for their games next month.
This absurdity — though no more absurd, I suppose, than the Snoop Dogg Arizona Bowl presented by Gin & Juice by Dre and Snoop — serves as the excellent marketing hook to get people to buy a $75/year print subscription, a major driver of The Onion’s revenue.
“We are a just a few thousand subscribers away from hitting 100,000 subscribers, which would catapult us above Jeff Bezos’ Washington Post in print circulation,” Collins wrote. “This would make us the 4th biggest newspaper in the United States. So we need more people to sign up before Christmas.”
Indeed, only three U.S. newspapers have a daily print circulation over 100,000 — The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and the New York Post; The Washington Post and USA Today have already fallen below that line. (At the risk of being pedantic, though, The Onion appears in print monthly, not daily, making it a bit of an apples-to-oranges comparison. Also, The Onion gets to make up its stories.)
Collins says The Onion actually got quite close to buying the naming rights to the New Orleans Bowl, which last year lost its longtime naming sponsor, the…Ohio-based freight-shipping concern R+L Carriers? The Onion was prepared to pay “mid six figures.” But the organization that runs the bowl, the Greater New Orleans Sports Foundation, apparently said no deep into the process, a move Collins attributed to “politics.” (I reached out to the Greater New Orleans Sports Foundation for comment — a sentence I did not expect to type today — but did not hear back.)
So the guys who sell bowl games ushered us to what we thought was a pretty good fit: The New Orleans Bowl.
I love New Orleans. I love having crawfish out of the back of a pickup truck at 3 a.m. The game would've been in the Superdome two days before Christmas. Good fit! Right? Right???
— Ben Collins (@bencollins.bsky.social) November 5, 2026 at 8:38 AM
Then the folks who run the New Orleans Bowl, a commission that includes representatives of the city and state of Louisiana, found out our plans to highlight our mascot:
The Sickos Guy.
— Ben Collins (@bencollins.bsky.social) November 5, 2026 at 8:39 AM
Despite getting all approvals from ESPN and scraping together the cash, right as we were about to sign the paper work to put The Onion Sports Bowl in New Orleans, their state-funded commission called us and said it straight up: "No."
We asked why. They said politics. And the Sickos Guy.
— Ben Collins (@bencollins.bsky.social) November 5, 2026 at 8:40 AM
While the New Orleans Bowl might be out, several currently-brand-free possibilities remain, including the Frisco Bowl in newly blue Texas — the state also home to The Onion’s rival to the death, Alex Jones.
