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The Vrbo Fiesta Bowl has played an integral role in the college football postseason landscape for decades.
The bowl pitted two independents together for the national championship when no other bowl could in 1987, with No. 1 Miami and No. 2 Penn State. It featured the first championship game of the BCS era in 1999, and in 2007 the Statue of Liberty Game, when Boise State shocked everybody and took down the mighty Oklahoma Sooners.
Now, the Fiesta Bowl enters a whole new era as the College Football Playoff expands. With 12 teams added to the field, State Farm Stadium in Glendale has become part of the permanent rotation of games. State Farm most recently hosted a semifinal in 2023 with No. 3 TCU and No. 2 Michigan, but will now host a College Football Playoff game every year moving forward.
The Fiesta Bowl will make history as it is the first quarterfinal game of the newly expanded CFP, which takes place the evening of Dec. 31. The rest of the quarterfinal games will be played on New Year’s Day.
“We are fortunate to have started with nine founders who had a pioneering spirit in figuring out how to make certain that Arizona had a bowl game, and that ASU at the time could get into a bowl game that mattered,” said Erik Moses, Fiesta Bowl CEO and executive director, during a press conference in Scottsdale on Thursday.
“We want to continue to pursue that pioneering spirit. We call ourselves the ‘Bowl of Firsts.’ It’s fitting that we would host the first quarterfinal. We’re honored to have that opportunity.”
The expansion of the playoff means the date of the Fiesta Bowl will fluctuate. For the 2025 season, the Fiesta Bowl will be a CFP semifinal game, which will be on Jan. 8, 2026. That will be the latest day for the Fiesta Bowl since 2009, when it was played on Jan. 5.
“It’s interesting because the entire season is now backed up,” Moses said. “It goes longer. The national championship will be played on MLK Day. I think there’s a little bit of wait-and-see when it comes to that. There are potentially five postseason games that we’re asking fans to attend now. If you go to your conference championship, say you lose, you go to your first-round game, quarterfinals, semifinals, national championship. That’s a lot.”
But he said the Dec. 31 date for this season is ideal.
“People are accustomed to the Fiesta Bowl being on that day. I think that will be great, it will be a hit,” he said. “We will have a top-four conference champion as the host team and then we will have a team that will have just come off a win in a first-round game. There will be more stories, more momentum around that.”
Next season’s semifinal game for the Fiesta Bowl a week later will create a different dynamic, he said.
“Our semifinal is going to be Jan. 8. People are back in school, folks are back at work. We’ll see. But the games will be bigger. I think that our college football fans can’t get enough of college football. I think the games will show well and will be well-attended from top to bottom. But there’s a little wait-and-see.”
The expanded field of teams means some matchups won’t be determined until a week before, but Moses doesn’t think that will impact ticket sales. The plan is to market ticket sales heavily to Arizona residents, Moses said, emphasizing the overall fan experience of the game as opposed to just who is competing.
But Moses did note one negative impact from the new CFP scheduling.
“One of the troubling – dare I say – parts of the expansion of the playoff is that teams will stay in market for shorter periods of time,” Moses said. “Two to three days for a quarterfinal this year. Most of that activity is going to be, frankly, focused here, Scottsdale Plaza, our host hotels, and not out in the community. And that’s tough. Every time I think about last year and the Liberty players building these wagons with Girl Scouts, or the Oregon players out with Mikey’s Kids and the Special Olympics running, those kids weren’t doing that because they had to. They were into it.”
“To lose that opportunity, or to have it severely limited because of the scheduling now, is something that I think concerns everybody in our business,” he said. “But it is a business, and we’re seeing the commercialization of college athletics in a way that coaches and schools want to win, and they want to move on. We are challenging ourselves to figure out ways to continue to engage the student-athletes and get them more involved with our community while they’re here.”
Logan Stanley is a sports reporter with The Arizona Republic who primarily focuses on high school, ASU and Olympic sports. To suggest ideas for human-interest stories and other news, reach out to Stanley at logan.stanley@gannett.com or 707-293-7650. Follow him on X, formerly Twitter: @LSscribe.
This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: Fiesta Bowl CEO Erik Moses addresses future of bowl game