This is an exciting time for the Arizona Bowl, which has become a Tucson staple over the past decade. The ninth iteration of the game is slated for 2:30 p.m. on Dec. 28 at Arizona Stadium. It has an intriguing — and globally famous — new sponsor: Snoop Dogg.
This is also a tenuous time for the Arizona Bowl, the bowl system and college football as a whole. The essence of the sport is changing. Conference realignment is continuing. The postseason is evolving.
Michael Lev is a senior writer/columnist for the Arizona Daily Star, Tucson.com and The Wildcaster.
How does the Arizona Bowl fit into that ecosystem? What does the future hold when the current cycle of bowl agreements ends after the 2025 game?
We spoke to several key stakeholders to find out. The overarching conclusion: No matter how the college football world changes — including the composition of the Arizona’s Bowl’s longstanding, loyal partner, the Mountain West Conference — Tucson’s bowl game and its philanthropic mission will endure.
“It’s really challenging in this environment,” said Kym Adair, longtime executive director of the Arizona Bowl. “But we know one thing: We’re tenacious. We are scrappy. Nothing is beyond our reach.
“We’re gonna go out, get together and find the best conferences for our game, period. I don’t even know what that looks like, honestly, but we’ll get them.”
You can’t blame Adair — or anyone — for being apprehensive about what’s to come. Because no one really knows. As Ali Farhang, the Arizona Bowl’s chairman of the board, put it: “Anybody who says they can predict what college football is going to look like in two years is just fooling you.”
The College Football Playoff finally is expanding this season, going from four to 12 participants. But the current agreement, coinciding with the bowl cycle, only runs through 2025. Expansion, starting in 2026, seems inevitable.
One of the metrics used in figuring out bowl affiliations is a conference’s historical average of bowl-eligible teams, said Bret Gilliland, deputy commissioner of the Mountain West Conference. As you can imagine, that’s a difficult calculation to make nowadays.
“That’s a question for every conference right now,” Gilliland said. “Does that ultimately define the universe?”
Arizona Bowl executive director Kym Adair, left, shown with bowl board member Kate Brock-Calhoun at a spring event announcing Gin & Juice by Dre and Snoop as the bowl game's new sponsor, is optimistic the Arizona Bowl's relationship with the Mountain West will continue despite the league's recent turbulence.
The Big Ten has grown from 14 to 18 schools. The ACC has swelled from 14 to 17. The SEC has gone from 14 to 16. The Big 12 now has 16 members. And the MWC, well, that’s complicated.
Preliminary talks underway
As of today, the MWC is exactly as we’ve known it for over a decade: 12 members, all residing in either the Mountains or the West, and all playing football.
Come 2026, the conference will have undergone a makeover not of its own doing. Boise State, Colorado State, Fresno State, San Diego State and Utah State are headed to the Pac-12, which poached those schools just as its former members were gobbled up by other leagues.
As of this writing — all such declarations must be couched this way — the MWC has eight football-playing schools: Air Force, Hawai’i, Nevada, New Mexico, San Jose State, UNLV, UTEP and Wyoming. It is pursuing a ninth, Northern Illinois, which has been a member of the Mid-American Conference — the Arizona Bowl’s other league partner — since 1997.
As other pundits have pointed out, DeKalb, Illinois, home of NIU, is neither mountainous (elevation: 879 feet) nor western (although it is on the western-most edge of the MAC). But we digress.
The Mountain West also has added Grand Canyon and UC Davis as non-football members, starting in 2026.
Got all that?
The details aren’t as important as the possible impact on the conference and its relationship with the Arizona Bowl. The defections have diminished the MWC to some degree. Is the league still the right fit for the Arizona Bowl? Does it make sense for the two entities to continue doing business with each other?
The answer seems to be a resounding yes.
Adair said the “groundwork for those discussions” already has begun, and she fully expects the MWC to remain one of the Arizona Bowl’s conference partners. Farhang described the relationship between the two as “strong” and “integral.” Gilliland said: “We are very invested in the Arizona Bowl, as well.”
Arizona Bowl chairman Ali Farhang signs a record — serving in place of a contract — following the introduction of the new sponsor for the Arizona Bowl in spring. Farhang said the partnership with Snoop Dogg is "proof positive" that "big things are possible in Tucson if you’re willing to imagine big."
The two go way back. The Mountain West has been affiliated with the Arizona Bowl since its inception in 2015. In fact, the first matchup pitted two MWC members against each other: Nevada vs. Colorado State.
It wasn’t supposed to be that way. But it was a necessary arrangement to pull off the first game on relatively short notice; it all came together in a matter of months.
“We had a unique challenge,” said Gilliland, who’s been with the MWC since its inception in 1999. “We didn’t have a team for the other side of the game. But we said, ‘We have to have a game or this concept’s not going to survive.’ ”
The Arizona Bowl didn’t just survive. It blossomed.
Imagining big
I asked Farhang and Adair some form of the same question after the 2024 matchup between CSU and Miami (Ohio) was announced this past Sunday: Did the MWC’s existential crisis cause angst in the Arizona Bowl offices?
“It wasn’t really angst,” Farhang said. “It was: How are things going to shake out? Because the Mountain West is strong. They’re going to be there. Moving forward, I envision that the Mountain West will be a big part of the discussion as we decide: What’s the next generation of our bowl game?”
“We’ve been doing this now a long time,” Adair said. “Probably five or six years ago, it would have created anxiety. Now it’s just another day in college football, which is crazy to think about.”
Adair and her team are able to take realignment and other news in stride because the Arizona Bowl is in a good place. It has stable leadership from people who truly care about its success and painting Tucson in the best possible light. It has never veered from its commitment to serve the community. And it’ll never have more eyeballs on it than this year, the first of a three-year sponsorship deal with Gin & Juice by Dre and Snoop.
“We don’t take anything for granted,” Adair said. “We’re always trying to get better and be better for our community overall. But I feel like (after) 10 years it’s hard to say we’re the new kids on the block, even though we feel like that sometimes.
"We're tenacious. We are scrappy. Nothing is beyond our reach," Arizona Bowl executive director Kym Adair says of the bowl game's future. "We're gonna go out, get together and find the best conferences for our game, period. I don't even know what that looks like, honestly, but we'll get them."
“We’ve got a really great, tenured staff, a team of people, blue blazers, board members, that have been around for a while and understand the dynamics of college football. We feel a little more secure in our role.”
That sense of security emboldens the folks who run the Arizona Bowl. Farhang said the partnership with Snoop Dogg is “proof positive” that “big things are possible in Tucson if you’re willing to imagine big.”
OK then. Imagine this: The Mountain West vs. the Pac-12 in future Arizona Bowls.
The two leagues currently are battling in court — stemming from the Pac-12 taking five of the MWC’s members — so there’s fodder for a real rivalry. The Arizona Bowl could corner the market on bowl-game bitterness.
Adair wouldn’t rule out the possibility.
“Everything’s on the table,” she said.
Even Gilliland, who couldn’t comment on the ongoing litigation, conceded: “In this current environment in college athletics I would not preclude anything.”
Mountain West vs. Pac-12 has already happened in a sense in that first Arizona Bowl matchup between Nevada and Colorado State.
“It could be a full-circle moment,” Adair said.
Who says no?
