As the initial ticket sales reports came in, Ken Haines looked around at his staff wondering if it was OK to smile.

"The numbers were so high, we thought we were misreading the reports," said Haines, the executive director of the inaugural Continental Tire Bowl. "We took out a calculator and figured out that if we sold this many tickets in this many days, we'd have no more tickets after five days. That's when it dawned on us that we had caught lightning in the bottle."

While second-tier bowl games are usually afforded a break even thanks to participating team quotas, bowl games that generate a healthy profit do so when fans travel well and patrons in the local community buy seats even before the teams are announced.

But marketing a bowl game isn't an easy chore and it has a lot to do with luck.

The Continental Tire Bowl -- played Saturday in Charlotte, N.C. -- has surprisingly sold out its 73,000-plus ticket allotment because of a variety of factors. The bowl game was slotted to get the fifth or sixth pick from the ACC and the third from the Big East, but ultimately picked Virginia (8-5, tied for second in the ACC) and West Virginia (9-3, second in the Big East). Virginia, which beat Maryland on Nov. 23, was stiffed because it was believed that its fans wouldn't travel well. West Virginia, which beat Virginia Tech and Pittsburgh in its final two games, didn't get a chance to play in the Gator Bowl because Notre Dame fell into that slot after missing out on a BCS game.

"With secondary bowls, if the teams you have had a better season than expected, fans are going to go to the bowl to show they support them," Haines said.

Haines also said that most secondary bowls, in this economy, are hurt by the short notice they give to fans, who will have to pay a pretty penny to travel to the tourist hot spots at this time of year.

"It's very expensive to head down to places like Florida," Haines said. "Both are teams are within a six-hour drive and that's why it was so important for us to align with the Big East and the ACC, because we found that people don't want to spend a lot of money traveling to second-tier bowl games."

Haines expected a crowd of 30,000 to 40,000, but now it appears like his bowl will be the second most successful inaugural bowl game since the 1990 Blockbuster Bowl, which featured Florida State and Penn State and drew more than 74,000 fans.

"If we could fit them, we would have sold another 10,000 seats," Haines said. Both schools were given an allotment of 12,500 tickets each, but Virginia has sold 20,000 and West Virginia has sold 30,000 tickets to the game. The rest of the tickets have been gobbled up by local Charlotte residents, who don't get a chance to see college football that often.

The Alamo Bowl hasn't had as much luck this year.

Although the bowl game have received the guaranteed proceeds from the sale of 21,600 tickets to bowl participants Wisconsin and Colorado, the Buffaloes returned approximately 7,000 tickets to distribute to charity and the Badgers gave back thousands more. The Big 12 -- which is expected to pay about $850,000 in unsold ticket costs for all its bowl games -- will save Colorado from hemorrhaging money, said Big 12 commissioner Kevin Weiberg.

"We really haven't had a problem like this in a long time," said Derrick Fox, executive director of the Alamo Bowl. "Typically, one team sells its whole allotment and the other comes really close." Fox said for the past seven years the game has averaged around 61,000 tickets sold or 94 percent capacity.

Colorado is known as a team that doesn't travel well and it didn't help that some fans traveled to Texas just three weeks ago to see them lose in the Big 12 championship game against Oklahoma. Wisconsin started off the season 5-0, but lost six out of their last eight games.

The key to the bowl business, Fox says, is to grow the fan base that buys tickets every year. The Alamo Bowl sells about 20,000 tickets to the local community and to those fans who have purchased tickets to the game before and want to reserve their spot should their Big Ten or Big 12 team return to San Antonio.

"Thanks to the local fan base and the guaranteed quotas from the teams, we have about 20,000 seats to sell each year," Fox said. "Our goal is to get enough people to buy tickets before the game, that we will be sold out as soon as we announce the teams."

Haines would like to say that the great turnout to his bowl game was as a result of his marketing genius, but he knows better.

"In the bowl business, not a whole lot is in your control," Haines said. "You just have to let the dominos fall and you must be positioned to take advantage when everything goes the right way."

"In my 25 years in this business, this is the most amazing thing I've ever seen," Haines said. "I'm glad it's not the summer. My mouth has been so wide open these past few weeks, I'd have a lot of flies in it."

Darren Rovell, who covers sports business for ESPN.com, can be reached at Darren.rovell@espn3.com.