Las Vegas Bowl Scheduled For Saturday Before Christmas

Royal Purple Las Vegas Bowl — Las Vegas Bowl

The Las Vegas Bowl is one of the most popular early college football bowl games. This year the game will be played December 20th, which is the Saturday before Christmas. Tickets sell really well (42K last year, that’s more than UNLV football sells all season <burn>) and since the Pac-12 and Mountain West teams are relatively close there are always plenty of people visiting Vegas for the game. Last year’s game was USC vs. Fresno State.

Tickets aren’t on sale for the game yet but you can follow LVBowl.com to stay up to date on that. Likewise, I’ll probably have a blog post on Vegas Chatter when the game is announced like I did last year.

The week before Christmas is one of the cheapest times to visit Las Vegas. Even if you’re not sure that you want to make the trip for the game you might want to put rooms on hold sooner than later just in case. You can always cancel hotel reservations, just ask for the cancellation policy when you hold your room.

College Football Talk has more information:

The Las Vegas Bowl will be played on the Saturday before Christmas, December 20. ESPN announced the date and time for the bowl game, which pairs up teams from the Pac-12 and Mountain West Conference, on Tuesday.

This year’s Las Vegas Bowl will be given a mid-afternoon kickoff time, 3:30 p.m. EST (12:30 p.m. PST), and will be televised nationally on ABC. The game typically takes the Mountain West champion — it is not obligated to take the conference champion — and has the sixth pick of available Pac-12 bowl-eligible teams. Last season’s game saw over 42,000 fans come out for a match-up between USC and Mountain West Conference champion Fresno State. The Trojans won the game, 45-20. In a bit of an odd scheduling quirk, Fresno State and USC will open the 2014 season playing each other in a quick turnaround rematch, this time in Los Angeles.

The Mountain West Conference owns a record of 9-6 n the Las Vegas Bowl. The Pac-12 is 6-6.