The Pop-Tarts Bowl and the future of college football's postseason - ESPN

For Michigan fans, the moment when the Wolverines clinched a national championship in January will echo through generations.

For everyone else, the most indelible image of the 2023-24 bowl season involves a 6-foot anthropomorphic pastry being lowered into a toaster, baked and devoured by ravenous Kansas State football players to the tune of Donna Summer's «Hot Stuff.»

This seems fair. Michigan, after all, has 12 national titles. Frosted Strawberry is, to the best of anyone's knowledge, the only mascot ever cooked and consumed by the winning team.

The gimmick, dreamed up by the folks at Florida Citrus Sports and Pop-Tarts' creative agency, Weber Shandwick, as a means of promoting the 2023 Pop-Tarts Bowl in Orlando, Florida, was an enormous coup for the title sponsor. Pop-Tarts earned a reported $12.1 million in media exposure from the game and sold 22 million more Pop-Tarts (or 11 million cellophane packs of two, to use proper breakfast pastry exchange rates) than it had the week prior to kickoff.

But in selling the brand, it's also entirely possible that, amid a tumultuous college sports landscape, the Pop-Tarts Bowl showed everyone a way forward. (Well, everyone except Frosted Strawberry. His journey ended in that toaster.)

«Nobody's going to forget the Frosted Strawberry descending into the toaster,» Matt Repchak, chief marketing officer for Florida Citrus Sports, the host of the Pop-Tarts Bowl, said. «That may be all of our legacies. But at the end of it, there's people who made memories while they were here, and we want to just be a fun part of the college football calendar.»

The top-line numbers around bowl games are a point of pride, as Bowl Season executive director Nick Carparelli said. Last year's bowls were