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acramento State’s move is already unprecedented in multiple ways. The Hornets are the first West Coast program to move from the Football Championship Subdivision (FCS) to the Football Bowl Subdivision (FBS) since the 1977 Division I split. They are also the MAC’s westernmost member ever. Many do not realize they could also make history for one of the Group of Five’s oldest bowl games.
Mobile, Alabama’s 68 Ventures Bowl has never hosted a team from California. In fact, they have never hosted a school west of Texas. This does not seem surprising given the bowl’s location. However, many may not remember that the bowl partnered with the Western Athletic Conference (WAC) in its early years. A California school was almost the conference’s first representative in the bowl.
The 1999 WAC title race was one of the most wide-open in the league’s history. By mid-November, Fresno State, Hawai’i, and TCU all were in the mix to win the conference. Naturally, this muddied the conference’s bowl picture. The Las Vegas Bowl picked the conference champion, and the Mobile Alabama Bowl had the second choice.
Before Fresno State’s season finale on November 20th, there was a realistic scenario where Hawai’i would win the WAC outright with a Bulldog loss to San Jose State and a TCU loss to SMU. This would have sent Hawai’i to the Las Vegas Bowl and Fresno State to the first-year Mobile Alabama Bowl.
This never came to fruition, as Fresno State beat San Jose State, and TCU beat SMU, creating a three-way tie for first place with Hawai’i, and granting bowl bids to all three. The Oahu Bowl invited Hawai’i as a de facto home team, and the Las Vegas Bowl took Fresno State, leaving the Mobile Alabama Bowl with TCU.
The following year’s race for the Mobile Alabama Bowl was less chaotic. TCU accepted a bid to the bowl on November 11th, ending all speculation early. The following year, the MAC replaced the WAC in the Mobile Alabama Bowl, ending all hope of a California school playing in the game, until now.
The now-68 Ventures Bowl is one of the least desirable bowls of the entire postseason. Recent selections belabor this point. In 2021, the Sun Belt vacated its spot in the bowl, allowing independent Liberty to play Eastern Michigan. The next year, 5-7 Rice played in the bowl. In 2023, 6-6 Eastern Michigan made its second trip to Mobile in three years after not beating a single team with a winning record. This past season, transitioning Delaware earned a spot in the bowl thanks to a shortage of bowl-eligible schools.
It is not too far-fetched to imagine the ESPN-owned bowls passing on Sacramento State and the 68 Ventures Bowl landing the Hornets. The Famous Idaho Potato Bowl could opt for a PAC-12/Mountain West grudge match, and Sacramento is 1700 miles from the trio of ESPN-owned bowls in the DFW area. This series of events could give the 68 Ventures Bowl its first California school, over 25 years after its partnership with the WAC ended. It would also make Sacramento State the second school from California to play in Mobile ever, and the first since #19 San Diego State lost to South Alabama in 2016.
Sacramento State’s move to the MAC surprisingly has one historical link. To make matters even more random, that link comes further away from the conference’s footprint. The link between Sacramento State, the MAC, and the LendingTree Bowl epitomizes the strangeness of FBS realignment.
