Arizona Bowl founder Ali Farhang traveled to frigid Laramie, Wyoming, for Saturday’s Mountain West Conference championship game, Wyoming vs. San Diego State.
Neither the Aztecs nor the Cowboys will play in the Dec. 30 Arizona Bowl at Arizona Stadium; Farhang’s mission was to do some last-day lobbying with MWC commissioner Craig Thompson.
Farhang and his Tucson group want the Air Force Academy Falcons to be the marquee team in Arizona Bowl II. That would be a coup of significance; the Falcons are 9-3 and their military connection to Davis-Monthan Air Force Base would swing the game’s marketing campaign.
Ideally, Air Force would play bowl-starved Idaho, which has played just two bowl games in history and plans to drop to the FCS (non-bowl) division in 2018. But ESPN programmers have intruded on an AFA-Idaho game in Tucson and are likely to put the Vandals in nearby Boise for a wintry, Dec. 22 Famous Potato Bowl.
Farhang and the Arizona Bowl will announce game pairings Sunday afternoon. The Sun Belt Conference representative could be Appalachian State, Troy or Arkansas State, or a Louisiana school with a hyphen in its name. If none of that works out, Tucson could get a 5-7 team from a Big Boy league, possibly Mississippi State.
Farhang, a Tucson attorney, declined to comment on the possibility of Air Force meeting an SEC team like Mississippi State, but he did laugh about visiting with the czars of the MWC in, of all places, the December tundra of Laramie.
“Maybe I should pitch the idea of playing their league championship game in Tucson,” he said with a laugh.
The Arizona Bowl’s affiliation with the MWC is a good one. If the Air Force connection doesn’t work, potential fall-back teams are Colorado State and New Mexico, although it’s more likely the Lobos will stay in Albuquerque for the hometown New Mexico Bowl.
“As we discovered last year, a lot of this goes to the 24th hour,” said Farhang. “We could be on the phone all morning Sunday, putting this thing together.”
