Photo by Michael Donahue

Steve Ehrhart, director of the AutoZone Liberty Bowl, says planning the game is a "year-round endeavor."

By late morning on Christmas Eve, the AutoZone Liberty Bowl offices in East Memphis were a hub of activity. Steve Ehrhart, the bowl's director for almost two decades now, sat in a chair behind a desk so filled with papers and file folders that it was hard to see the color of the surface. The desk phone rang every few minutes.

This shouldn't be surprising. After all, the one football game that is the culmination of his year was only seven days and a few hours away.

What still surprises Ehrhart, though, are friends who will tease him in the coming months about how he has nothing at all to do.

"It's a year-round endeavor and it starts next week when we have some meetings with some other bowls down at the BCS Championship Game," he said, referring to the bowls' get-together in Miami. "So people say, 'Well, you're going to take some time off?' "

At that, he laughs.

But this year's "offseason" is more important than most. In the coming months, the Liberty Bowl will try to strike a deal with the best conferences it can to send teams to Memphis beginning with the 2014 game. It's the product of a ripple effect: The Liberty Bowl's contracts are up at the same time the rest of the bowl system is being overhauled. So while college football fans celebrate the arrival of a four-team playoff beginning that year, the folks who run Memphis' decades-old postseason game try to make sense of their place in the structure of it all.

At this crossroads of sorts, and on the eve of Monday's game between Tulsa and Iowa State, a look at the bowl's public financial records and an extended interview with Ehrhart help shine a light on what it takes to put on this Memphis tradition and where it's heading.

What it takes

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AutoZone Liberty Bowl approaching important 'offseason'