Las Vegas Bowl Matches Mountain West Power Boise State Vs. Washington In Final Bowl Game At Sam Boyd Stadium
By Alan Snel of LVSportsBiz.com
For the final Las Vegas Bowl at Sam Boyd Stadium, the organizers of the ESPN-owned college bowl game has lined up Mountain West champ Boise State to play Pac-12 brand name team Washington for the Dec. 21 showdown.
In other words, expects lots of Chris Petersen storyline pieces.
Petersen is leaving as Washington’s head football coach after he served as Boise State’s head football coach for eight years, which included two BCS bowl wins in the 2007 and 2010 Fiesta Bowl.
And UNLV is hunting for a new football coach after Tony Sanchez was fired after being the Rebels top coach for five years. So, Petersen-to-UNLV rumors will likely pop up, too.
It’s all the final time that the Las Vegas Bowl will be staged at Sam Boyd Stadium. The bowl game is moving up in stature by moving to the Raiders’ Allegiant Stadium in 2020.
It’s also the swansong for the Mountain West’s affiliation with the Las Vegas Bowl. The Pac-12 will stay involved as a participating conference. But starting in 2020, the SEC and Big 10 conferences will rotate with representative teams. It’s a six-year deal from 2020-2025, with the SEC playing the Pac-12 in 2020, 2022 and 2024, while the Pac-12 will tackle the Big Ten in 2021, 2023 and 2025.
Mitsubishi Motors has the title sponsorship to this year’s bowl game and the car company will get a crack at renewing the sponsorship deal for the bowl game when the event moves to the Raiders’ 65,000-seat domed stadium on the west side of Interstate 15 next year.
The bowl game’s executive director, John Saccenti, is ready to leave Sam Boyd Stadium for the Raiders’ $2 billion stadium project in 2020.
“I got my fill of Sam Boyd Stadium,” Saccenti quipped at the team announcement media conference at the Hard Rock hotel-casino around 1 p.m. Sunday. “The fun part is sitting around telling stories.”
This will be the 28th Las Vegas Bowl. The Boise-State-Washington showdown is a re-match of the 2012 bowl game, which featured the Broncos beating the Huskies, 28-26. Boise State is 12-1, while Washington is 7-5 in 2019.
The game will be televised on ABC-TV at 4:30 p.m. Dec. 21.
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