New Mexico Bowl moving to fourth Saturday in December. Here’s why.

Jun. 6—Maybe a couple of New Mexico Bowl tickets would be a good stocking stuffer this year.

For the first time in the 19-year history of the state’s annual college football bowl game, hosted each December in Albuquerque, the bowl game will be taking place after Christmas.

Due to some reshuffling of the traditional bowl season schedule due to the expanded 12-game College Football Playoffs, which begin this year, the ESPN-owned Isleta New Mexico Bowl, will kick off on ESPN at 12:15 p.m. on Saturday, Dec. 28, featuring a team from the Mountain West conference and a team from either Conference USA, the American Athletic Conference, the Sun Belt Conference or the MidAmerican Conference.

The New Mexico Bowl took place on the third Saturday of December in 17 of its first 18 years (the COVID-related relocation to Frisco, Texas, on Christmas Eve 2020, being the exception).

“I’m excited about this opportunity,” New Mexico Bowl Executive Director Jeff Siembieda told the Journal. “Bowl games have been held on the 26th, 27th, 28th, 29th for years in communities. I’m excited to just do something a little different for our community and take an event that’s been so, so positive for this community, and see how it does in a different time slot, on a different place on the calendar. I think it should be terrific.”

This year, the CFP will kick off with one of its four first-round games on Friday, Dec. 20 and three more first-round games on Saturday, Dec. 21 — the third Saturday in December.

When it was agreed to by all bowls not to schedule games on Dec. 21 for this first year of the 12-team playoff, the New Mexico Bowl probably could have explored weekday options or maybe even pushed up in the calendar to be played on Dec. 14, the day that two bowl games — the non-FBS Cricket Celebration Bowl and the Camellia Bowl — will now…


Source link : https://sports.yahoo.com/mexico-bowl-moving-fourth-saturday-030100224.html

Author : Albuquerque Journal, N.M.

Publish date : 2024-06-07 03:01:00

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