This has been a miserable failure.
For the several days since the Tampa Bay Times' Richard Danielson reported that Outback Bowl president and CEO Jim McVay earns a salary of - you might want to sit down and swallow that last sip of coffee to avoid a spit-take - 30 million in local economic juice, which other economists dismiss as a boatload of phooey.
The working theory here is that while 30 million is merely money being spent on Outback Bowl events that would normally have been spent on other things, anyway.
This is the same argument that is always raised in sports crazy Tampa Bay whenever it comes to our games. The Tampa Bay Buccaneers argued they needed a new taxpayer funded Hellooooooo Sucker Stadium based on the "economic impact" theory - as if every time Gerald McCoy breaks wind in Lutz, a Mercedes-Benz gets sold in Ruskin.
What Tampa does get because of the Outback Bowl is a few days of very nice exposure on national television. That's not so bad. But is it worth the 993,000-a-year to stage a single football game, would you say, "Oh tut-tut, no, a thousand times no! I can't take that much money. Please, please, please pay me much less!"?
Didn't think so.