What is the Fiesta Bowl?
In 1970 Arizona State went undefeated and no bowl invited them, so the Valley built one. The first Fiesta Bowl was played on December 27, 1971, at Sun Devil Stadium in Tempe, where the Sun Devils beat Florida State 45–38 before about 51,000 people, and it has been played every season since. For 36 years it lived in the stadium between the buttes, now Mountain America Stadium; since 2007 it has been in the domed stadium in Glendale, now State Farm Stadium, 45 minutes west of Old Town.
It became a big game fast. Sunkist made it the first bowl with a corporate title sponsor in 1986, the Penn State–Miami game that followed decided a national title, and the Fiesta hosted the championship game of the Bowl Alliance and BCS in January 1996, 1999 and 2003. It has been one of the six bowls of the College Football Playoff since 2014: a semifinal in 2016, 2019, 2022 and January 2026, when Miami beat Ole Miss 31–27 before 67,928, and a quarterfinal in the expanded bracket’s first year. The 2026 Fiesta Bowl is a CFP quarterfinal on Wednesday, December 30, 2026; in the 2027 season the quarterfinal falls on January 1, 2028.
The organization behind it is the thing Scottsdale visitors miss. The Fiesta Sports Foundation, the nonprofit that stages the Fiesta Bowl, the Cactus Bowl in Tempe on December 26 and the Fiesta Bowl Parade down Central Avenue on January 2, 2027, is headquartered at 7135 E Camelback Road at the Scottsdale Waterfront, where its free Ziegler Fiesta Bowl Museum holds the trophies. It reports $35 million in charitable giving to Arizona over fifteen years. The game is a road trip; the parade is free; the museum is a ten-minute walk from Fashion Square. Together they are the Valley’s football holiday, and they bracket the week between December and January when Scottsdale’s hotels are fullest.
How to do bowl week from Scottsdale
The parade is the easy win. The Phoenix Children’s Fiesta Bowl Parade steps off at 10 a.m. Saturday, January 2, 2027, at Central Avenue and Montebello, runs south to Camelback Road, turns east to Seventh Street and finishes just south of there, about 1.5 miles of marching bands, floats, equestrian units and the bowl’s queen and court. It is free, it has run since 1973, and the crowd lines both curbs by 9:30. Drive 25 minutes west on Camelback, park near a light-rail stop north of the route and stand on the west side of Central for shade. Bring chairs and a jacket; a Phoenix January morning starts in the 40s.
The game is a commitment. State Farm Stadium is at the 101 and Glendale Avenue, 45 minutes from Old Town with no traffic and two hours with it. For a playoff game, leave four hours before kickoff, take the Loop 101 west around the north side of the Valley, and buy a stadium-lot pass in advance; the neighborhoods close their streets. Eat and drink at Westgate, the entertainment district next to the stadium, before you go in, and plan to sit in the lot for an hour after. The dome keeps the game at 70 degrees whatever the night does.
Tickets. Quarterfinal tickets sell through the Fiesta Sports Foundation’s ticket office and the resale market once the bracket is set in early December; playoff pricing had not posted as of October 2026, and recent playoff games here have run several hundred dollars a seat on the secondary market. If you just want a bowl game, the Cactus Bowl on Saturday, December 26 at 5:30 p.m. in Tempe is the better value: a Big Ten–Big 12 matchup, twenty minutes from Old Town, in the open-air stadium where the Fiesta Bowl was born, after nine years at Chase Field.
The museum. The Ziegler Fiesta Bowl Museum at 7135 E Camelback Road, Suite 190, is open weekday business hours and free. It has the trophies, the history and the Scottsdale connection in one room, and it is the right stop with out-of-town guests who want a piece of bowl week without a ticket.
Where it fits. Bowl week collides with the holiday season in Scottsdale: resorts are full, Old Town is lit, and the fans in team colors at the Waterfront bars on December 29 are here for this. Book the hotel before the bracket is announced if you can.
From a WAC grievance to the playoff
The Fiesta Bowl exists because of a slight. Wyoming went 10–1 in 1968 and Arizona State 8–2 in 1969 and 11–0 in 1970, and the Western Athletic Conference champion was passed over for the major bowls each time. A group of Valley businessmen and ASU boosters answered by creating a bowl of their own, in a stadium that could hold 51,000 and a city that wanted the television exposure. The first game matched the WAC champion against an independent, Florida State, and the Sun Devils won it. They won the next two Fiesta Bowls as well, which did the new game no harm.
The next step was money. In 1986 Sunkist paid to put its name in front of the game, the first title sponsorship of any bowl, and the Fiesta used the cash to lure Penn State and Miami, both undefeated and both unattached to a conference bowl, to a January 2, 1987 game that settled the national championship and drew the largest television audience a college game had ever had. From then on the Fiesta was a major bowl in fact if not in pedigree. It hosted the title game of the Bowl Alliance in January 1996, of the BCS in January 1999, when Tennessee beat Florida State before a record 80,470, and again in January 2003, when Ohio State beat Miami in double overtime. Sponsors followed: IBM, then Tostitos for eighteen years, then PlayStation, and since 2022 Vrbo.
In 2007 the game left Tempe for the Cardinals’ new dome in Glendale, where Boise State beat Oklahoma with a Statue of Liberty play in its first Glendale edition, and the Valley took on separate BCS championship games in 2007 and 2011. Then came the scandal. A 2011 internal investigation found the bowl had reimbursed employees for political contributions and spent lavishly on executives and officials; CEO John Junker was fired, pleaded guilty to a federal felony and served eight months. The BCS fined the bowl a million dollars and kept it, and the organization rebuilt itself under new leadership as a charity first, with the games as the engine. It has been a College Football Playoff bowl since 2014.
The Scottsdale office
The Fiesta Bowl has never been played in Scottsdale, but it is run from Scottsdale, from an office at 7135 E Camelback Road at the Waterfront, a block from Fashion Square. That is where the bracket announcement is watched, where the volunteer “Yellow Jackets” committee that staffs the games is based, and where the trophies sit in a free museum most people walk past. The Cardinals left Tempe for Glendale in 2006 and took the Fiesta with them; Scottsdale kept the headquarters, the hotel nights and the fans in the bars. Of the Valley’s big-event economy, the Fiesta Bowl is the one that fills the week between Christmas and New Year’s, when the Phoenix Open is still a month away and the car auctions have not arrived. Go to the parade, visit the museum, and if a quarterfinal matchup you care about lands on December 30, make the drive to Glendale. The game that began as a grievance is now one of the eight that decide the national champion, and it is still the Valley’s.