After Arizona beat Nebraska in the 1998 Holiday Bowl to cap a historic 12-1 season, the Daily Star's banner headline read: HAPPY HOLIDAY.
It was surely the most acclaimed victory in UA football history.
Now, 28 years later, the most fitting headline after Arizona's suffocating Holiday Bowl loss to SMU would be: HOLIDAY HUMBUG.
This time, plumbing the depths of a sobering 24-19 loss, the Wildcats found themselves in the sub-basement of the bowl season. Over the next 28 years, long-suffering UA football fans will find fitting nicknames for Friday's torment. Call it the Opt-Out Bowl. Or the Light's Out Bowl. Can you imagine how dreadful the six-hour journey back to Tucson was for several thousand Wildcat fans who drove through the lowlights of Gila Bend, Yuma and El Centro, wondering if they'd ever wasted so much time and money to watch such a distorted football game?
The Wildcats' chances to beat SMU and finish 10-3 were marginalized, seriously damaged, when star-level defensive backs Treydan Stukes, Genesis Smith and Dalton Johnson chose not to play. They became dreaded opt-outs, a term that has cracked the fiber of team-first competition and diminished the meaning of all non-CFP post-season games.
To be fair, Arizona greatly benefitted from "opt outs" at the 2023 Alamo Bowl when nine Oklahoma players, including future NFL quarterback Dillon Gabriel, chose not to play against the underdog Wildcats. How significant was that? Arizona's opt outs included left tackle Jordan Morgan, quarterback Jayden de Laura, who had lost his job to Noah Fifita, and end-of-the-bench players Canyon Moses and Isaiah Taylor.
Arizona rallied to win 38-24, giving the Wildcats a totally unexpected 10-3 season, which surely led to coach Jedd Fisch being viewed as such an attractive coaching commodity that he was hired away by Washington a few weeks later.
What goes around comes around, right?
The players who replaced Arizona's opt-outs were Gavin Hunter (a sophomore with 11 career tackles), freshman Coleman Patmon (five career tackles) and freshman Dajon Hinton (one career tackle). It took SMU 68 seconds to score a touchdown against the UA's compromised defense. SMU led 24-0 seemingly before Fox's first TV commercial.
Game over.
SMU running back T.J. Harden, right, celebrates with SMU Joshua Bates after Harden scored a touchdown during the first half of the Holiday Bowl against Arizona Friday, Jan. 2, 2026, in San Diego.
There is now a website called the "Opt Out Tracker," which posts the growing list of college football players who quit on their bowl teams, believing it is not worth taking a chance on getting injured in a bowl game and thus weakening their future NFL Draft status. It's a sad me-first approach to a game that used to be team-first. ASU had nine players opt out of the Sun Bowl last week. Texas had 11 opt-outs at the Citrus Bowl. USC had eight opt-outs at the Alamo Bowl.
Like the UA on Friday, the Sun Devils and Trojans lost opt-out bowls, too.
Arizona's collapse at the Holiday Bowl was a frigid blast of reality on what college football has become. Humbug to all of it.
