SAN DIEGO — The teams set to face off in the 43rd annual SDCCU Holiday Bowl in San Diego were announced Sunday. The UCLA Bruins and the North Carolina State Wolfpack will meet at Petco Park on Dec 28, according to organizers.
The bowl game has been played in San Diego several times but this will be the first time the Downtown stadium will host the matchup. And the first time a football game is played at Petco Park.
The sale of SDCCU Stadium -- where the Holiday Bowl had been played since its inaugural edition in 1978 through 2019 -- to San Diego State University in 2020, and its demolition to make way for a west campus and Aztec Stadium, left the bowl game without a home.
The game will be played at Petco Park under an amendment to a joint agreement with the San Diego Padres approved by the City Council in July, overturning a previous ban on football at the downtown baseball stadium.
This year marks the first time an ACC team - the Wolfpack - has ever played in the Holiday Bowl. The bowl game will match teams from the ACC and Pac-12 through at least 2025, according to organizers.
“We could not have asked for a more exciting matchup for the SDCCU Holiday Bowl’s first game in Petco Park,” said Mark Neville, CEO of the Holiday Bowl. “Fans can expect plenty of fireworks on and off the field December 28 and an experience that is second to none.”
The Holiday Bowl gets the third selection among Pac-12 Conference teams, with the Rose Bowl getting the conference champion and the Alamo Bowl getting the second choice. The Holiday Bowl is in a group with the Cheez-It Bowl and Gator Bowl that have the first picks among Atlantic Coast Conference teams following the New Year's Six bowls.
UCLA will playing in the game for the second time. The Bruins lost to Baylor, 49-26, in the 2012 game.
UCLA (8-4) will enter the Holiday Bowl on a three-game winning streak. The Bruins will be making their first bowl appearance since 2017 when they lost to Kansas State, 35-17, in the Cactus Bowl.
North Carolina State (9-3) has won four of its last five games. The Wolfpack were 18th in The Associated Press poll released Sunday, three spots higher than the previous week. UCLA is unranked.
The Holiday Bowl was canceled in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
"This has been the most difficult decision our board has ever had to make since our bowl game started in 1978," Mark Neville said at the time. "While it's not the decision we wanted to make, it's the right decision for our nonprofit association and the community for the long term."
The bowl game was created to fill hotel rooms in late December, typically the slowest tourism period of the year in San Diego.
An average of 28,000 hotel rooms have been rented annually over the past decade in connection to the game, which annually generated an average of $31 million of economic activity during the period, Rick Schloss, the director of media relations for the San Diego Bowl Game Association said last year.
The matchup between the UCLA Bruins from the Pac-12 Conference and the 18th-ranked NC State Wolfpack from the ACC will kick off at 5 p.m. on Dec. 28. Tickets for the game range from $35 to $265. Visit HolidayBowl.com for more information.
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