The Onion could sponsor a college football bowl game in North Texas

The Brief

• Satirical newspaper The Onion wants to sponsor a college football bowl game, and they could be considering a North Texas bowl game.
• The Onion CEO Ben Collins says the company could try to sponsor the First Responder Bowl in an interview with Pablo Torre, and suggested the company previously tried to sponsor the Frisco Bowl.
• Collins says the bowl game would include ads for fake products and an in-game ejection camera with paid actors during the game to keep in line with the company's sardonic nature.

FRISCO, Texas - The world's silliest newspaper wants to sponsor a college football bowl game, and it could happen at a bowl game played in North Texas.

The Onion Bowl?

What we know

Ben Collins, the CEO of satirical newspaper The Onion, is campaigning for his company to sponsor a college football bowl game.

The company is currently holding a sale to try and get the funds to sponsor a bowl game on ESPN, which he says costs around $400,000.

On social media platform Bluesky, Collins said the game could take place in Texas. In an interview with sports journalist Pablo Torre, Collins mentioned the First Responder Bowl as an option.

This year's edition of the First Responder Bowl, currently sponsored by SERVPRO, will be played on January 2, 2027, at Gerald J. Ford Stadium, home of the SMU Mustang in University Park.

Other bowls mentioned as an option for a potential Onion Bowl include the Boca Raton Bowl in Boca Raton, Florida, the Famous Idaho Potato Bowl in Boise, Idaho, and the Myrtle Beach Bowl in Conway, South Carolina.

Dig deeper

In the same interview with Torre, Collins said he approached ESPN two years ago about sponsoring the Frisco Bowl, currently played at The Star in Frisco, but says ESPN stopped the move.

In his Bluesky thread, Collins says the company had a deal to sponsor the New Orleans Bowl in 2024 before the bowl's organizers balked at the idea of the "Sickos Guy" as the bowl's mascot.

Collins says the idea for the bowl game came from watching the Pop Tarts Bowl, and joked a bowl game sponsored by The Onion would feature "the two worst teams in the country, it's nine quarters long, and there was no penalty for running into the kicker."

If The Onion does get its hands on a bowl sponsorship? Collins says former ESPN personality Kenny Mayne would be the bowl's in-game host.

In-game entertainment would include an "ejection cam" where paid actors would be ejected by costumed mascots when shown on a jumbotron. On another jumbotron, the entirety of "Jurassic Park" would be played at a low volume for fans who don't care about football.

Collins mentions ads for the company's physical newspaper would be shown during commercial breaks, but nonsensical ads for nonexistent products like "dog blood" would make up the majority of the advertising.

It remains to be seen if this bowl game will happen, but if it does, you can count this writer as someone who will be watching it.

The Source

Information in this story comes from The Onion CEO Ben Collins' Bluesky and an interview with Pablo Torre.