The news conference was scheduled to begin in about 10 minutes to announce the participants in the fifth Nova Home Loans Arizona Bowl. Kym Adair, the bowl game’s executive director, was pretty sure she knew who those teams would be.
But she still hadn’t received official confirmation, and the clock was ticking.
As she nervously waited for a phone call, or perhaps a text message, Adair chatted with Jon Volpe, the CEO of Nova Home Loans, and his wife, Heather. The conference room at Topgolf was still relatively empty and quiet. The announcement was slated for 1:15 p.m. Sunday.
At 1:17, Adair’s phone rang.
“Hi, Commissioner,” she said.
The person on the other end of the line was Keith Gill, the first-year commissioner of the Sun Belt Conference. A short conversation ensued.
“Perfect, sir,” Adair concluded. “Thank you.”
The matchup was set. The 2019 Arizona Bowl would feature Georgia State of the Sun Belt and Wyoming of the Mountain West Conference. Given all the available options, it couldn’t have worked out much better in Adair’s view.
“I’m really feeling like all of the pieces for this year have come together,” she said. “We couldn’t be more excited about what we’re going to see out there.”
The Panthers and Cowboys are both 7-5. Both are also first-time participants in the Arizona Bowl, which will kick off at 2:30 p.m. on Dec. 31 at Arizona Stadium.
The similarities don’t stop there. Both teams opened the season with upsets over SEC schools.
GSU stunned Tennessee — a 25-point favorite — by a score of 38-30 in front of 85,503 mostly orange-clad fans at Neyland Stadium in Knoxville on Aug. 31. That same day, Wyoming tripped up Missouri — a 17.5-point favorite — by a nearly identical count (37-31) in Laramie.
So began a season of redemption for the Cowboys, who didn’t earn a bowl berth in 2018 despite being eligible for one. The 2018 squad won its final four games to finish 6-6. But the Mountain West had an overabundance of bowl-eligible teams, and the Cowboys got left out.
“Wyoming really wanted to come last year,” Adair said. “They blew our social-media channels up.
“I actually got a call from the president of the Wyoming Senate on the night before Selection Sunday, begging us to please take Wyoming, we won’t be disappointed.
“We weren’t able to make that happen last year. But since then we have been eager to get Wyoming here to Southern Arizona. We know they’re going to travel big, and we know that they’re going to put a top-notch football team onto our field.”
The Arizona Bowl had relatively little control over team assignments over the past five years, a situation that will improve drastically when the next cycle begins in 2020. At that point the Arizona Bowl will begin affiliations with the Mountain West and Mid-American conferences and will have the second pick from each of those leagues.
Wyoming was an attractive option for the Arizona Bowl because of the Cowboys’ fervent fan base. UW athletic director Tom Burman said during a conference call Sunday that he expected Wyoming fans to travel “very well.”
“I am a little bit concerned (because) it’s a midweek game,” Burman said. “It’s a Tuesday, so people have to take time off work a little bit, versus a Saturday game. But it’s Arizona, it’s Tucson, it’s a great city and our fans love their Cowboys.”
Burman estimated that 3,000-5,000 fans would travel from Wyoming to Arizona for the game. That total doesn’t include the snowbirds who are already here.
“I’ve been hearing from them all day,” Burman said. “So we’ll have a lot of locals. We’re going to have a lot of people making the trip down.”
Burman noted that the Cowboys have played in bowl games in Tucson before, having participated in the 1990 and ’93 Copper Bowls.
Georgia State and its fans will have a different experience.
“I don’t believe we have an individual on our roster or a coach that has been to Arizona,” Panthers coach Shawn Elliott said.
Georgia State is located in Atlanta, and it’s still a fledgling football program, having just played its 10th season. The Panthers’ only previous postseason experience has been in the Cure Bowl, which is played in Orlando, Florida. Elliott said he and his team were “thrilled to death” to find out they’d be heading Tucson later this month.
“If you know the bowl system and you know the pecking order of things, you can get an idea of one or two places where you think you might go,” Elliott said. “We knew the potential to go to Arizona was really (at) the forefront, and we were just excited about it.
“Everybody kind of wanted that trip. We were thinking, ‘What a great opportunity to go do something we’ve never experienced before.’ That’s one of our mottos here at Georgia State: ‘Let’s go do things that’s never been done before.’ ”
