The Fiesta Bowl, Boise State, and the Future (part two of three)

It is an effort to list all of the consequences of that single football game.

The 1975 Fiesta Bowl was the game that turned college football on its head, opened up the Pac-8 to the Arizona schools, put the Fiesta Bowl on the map, introduced a college football-watching country to an entire time zone, and helped inch the football world toward an opening-up of television contracts.

(It is hard to remember but well to remember how byzantine the bylaws and contracts were back then. Until the late seventies, neither the Big-10 nor Pac-Ten could send a team to any bowl but the Rose, and so in 1974, for instance, Michigan started the season 10-0, lost to Ohio State, and stayed home. Also, the NCAA negotiated all television contracts, and allowed only a handful of games on the air. Nowadays the Pac-10 and Big-10 send at least ten teams to bowl games, and on Saturdays one can watch college football, uninterrupted, from late morning until past midnight on multiple stations. A single school (Notre Dame) has its own network television contract, for heaven's sake.)

What happened soon thereafter was a realization by many that both the Fiesta Bowl and Arizona State had outgrown one another, and both had outgrown the WAC. Arizona State was ready to challenge for the Rose Bowl, and the Fiesta Bowl was ready to be more than a mere showcase for ASU. In 1978, Arizona State (along with Arizona) moved to the Pac-8, making it the Pac-10; and the Fiesta Bowl, which was contractually allowed to break its ties with the WAC should any team leave the conference (of course, everyone knew the clause had been written with ASU in mind), became free to offer both of its bids to any team that would accept them. This double-bid status became a piece of enormous good luck over the next dozen years, as independents, along with conference champions with no bowl tie-ins, became the Next Big Thing in college football.

A bowl designed for an upstart became an upstart itself, moving to New Year's Day in 1981 as a clear challenge to the Big Four. Soon thereafter, the game became the first to add a corporate title to its name. The Sunkist Fiesta Bowl was born, the appearance purse bulged, and the game became a locus of perennial national consequence. It helped that over a seven-year span, six independents (Miami three times, Penn State twice, Notre Dame once) won the national championship, two of them by winning the Fiesta Bowl. (Had Penn State beaten Oklahoma in the 1986 Orange Bowl, the string would have been seven-of-seven.) The watershed was during the 1986 season, when it became clear that two undefeated independents--Miami and Penn State--would wind up the regular season No. 1 and No. 2. Completely free of any conference tie-in, the Fiesta Bowl went to work, taking the revolutionary step of moving the 1987 game to January 2nd and then fattening the purse. The traditional bowls (especially the Orange, which considered Miami its possession) howled, but the two teams met in that year's Game of the Century. It hardly mattered that the game itself was a dud, aside from the thrill of watching a Miami team full of loudmouths and criminals beaten 14-10 by Joe Paterno's Eagle Scouts (the offensive player of the game was John Bruno, the Penn State punter.) The 1987 Fiesta Bowl was the highest-rated football game to that point, and there was no turning back.

Occasionally, the double-indy system did not work. Sometimes the game was the runner-up bowl; it seemed for half-a-dozen years that Nebraska (by losing to Oklahoma) kept playing Florida State (which kept losing to Miami). And occasionally the greatest schemes fell flat; in 1993, the game set itself up for a re-match of a Notre Dame-Florida State thriller, but Notre Dame spoiled everything by losing to Boston College, and the Fiesta was left scrambling, finally settling on Arizona and a Miami team imploding from a decade's worth of misbehavior. (Arizona breezed, 29-0, in a stinker; on a hunch, my younger brother Rob and I drove to Sun Devil Stadium New Year's morning and bought a pair of field-level seats from two kids unloading their parents tickets. We paid fifteen bucks--total. Try doing that these days.) Often enough, though, the formula did work, and when the wind blew the other way--when Penn State, Miami, Florida State, Pittsburgh, and every other major college program save Notre Dame became conference aligned--the Fiesta Bowl swung back again, and found its way into the Bowl Alliance, and ultimately the BCS, hosting the championship game every fourth year. When the BCS added a fifth bowl, a stand-alone BCS championsip to rotate between the four BCS sites and run a week after New Years', the Fiesta Bowl location (now moved across the Valley to Glendale for the new stadium) was chosen as the first host.

The real loser, as time went on, was the Cotton Bowl: not as nimble, not as spendthift, too interested in landing the Heisman Trophy winner; plus the game is played in a bad neighborhood in, too often, terrible weather. (Don't know why, but New Year's Day in Dallas is almost always miserable: either wet or freezing, and always windy. Just ask Joe Montana.) The founders of the Fiesta Bowl had wanted, more than anything, to convince the country that the Valley of the Sun was as good a place to spend Christmas week as Southern California, Miami or New Orleans. To that extent--and against a dozen bowls that might have beaten them, had any of them been a little more aggressive--they had succeeded.