Touchdown AZ - Tostitos Fiesta Bowl
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C onsidered one of the nation’s most important college football bowl games, the Fiesta Bowl was started because Arizona State University and its former athletic conference just couldn’t get any respect. Despite stellar football seasons, the ASU Sun Devils and other top-ranking Western Athletic Conference (WAC) teams often had to spend bowl season on the sidelines because they didn’t receive invitations to any bowl games. If they did get invitations, the games were usually second- or even third-tier. To remedy that problem, a group of business owners and Valley leaders took up a call made by past ASU Pres. G. Homer Durham in 1968 to get a college football bowl game in Phoenix. In 1970, the group put together a proposal to present to the NCAA Extra Events Committee. The group proposed a game with a tie-in to the WAC, as well as making it a charitable event. The group’s efforts initially failed, but the following year, the NCAA awarded a bowl game to the Valley — the Fiesta Bowl. Growing ImportanceOver the 1970s and 1980s, the Fiesta Bowl grew steadily in popularity with television audiences and in prestige among college football officials and fans. In 1982, the Fiesta Bowl was played for the first time on New Year’s Day before a sellout crowd of 71,053. Six years later, the Sunkist Fiesta Bowl Classic signed a contract with NBC to televise the game. As a result, the game payout increased to $3 million per team. The Sunkist Fiesta Bowl Classic continued to grow in importance in 1991, when it was asked to join college football’s Bowl Coalition made up of the Cotton, Orange and Sugar bowls. Champion teams from the Atlantic Coast, Big East, Big Eight, Southeastern and Southwest conferences, as well as Notre Dame and two at-large teams, would fill the eight slots in all four games. In 1994, the IBM OS/2 Fiesta Bowl Football Classic was named to a new College Football Bowl Alliance with the Orange and Sugar bowls, which guaranteed the three games a national championship matchup on a rotating basis. The newly dubbed Tostitos Fiesta Bowl hosted its first Bowl Alliance national championship in 1996. |
Tostitos Fiesta BowlDate: Jan. 4, 2010 University of
Phoenix
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Big changes were in store for the Tostitos Fiesta Bowl in the new millennium. In 2006, after 35 years, the last Fiesta Bowl was played at ASU’s Sun Devil Stadium in Tempe. The following year, the newly built University of Phoenix Stadium in Glendale, home to the NFL’s Arizona Cardinals, hosted its first Tostitos Fiesta Bowl and first college football game ever. Corporate SponsorshipIn 1985, the Fiesta Bowl pioneered corporate sponsorship of bowl games when the Sunkist Growers entered into a fiveyear, multimillion-dollar deal to rename the Fiesta Bowl the Sunkist Fiesta Bowl Classic. It was the nation’s first college bowl game sponsorship, and increased the Fiesta Bowl’s team payouts to more than $1 million. The Fiesta Bowl took on a new sponsor in 1992, when IBM agreed to sponsor the game, renaming it the IBM OS/2 Fiesta Bowl Football Classic. Three years later, the game the nation knows today was born when Frito Lay took over sponsorship from IBM, and the Fiesta Bowl became the familiar Tostitos Fiesta Bowl. www.fiestabowl.org
Visit touchdownazonline.com to view this years digital Issue
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The ’90s ended just as strong as they had
begun, with the Tostitos Fiesta Bowl hosting
the first-ever unified college football
national championship in 1999.
