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The 1987 Fiesta Bowl was a college football bowl game that served as the final game of the 1986 NCAA Division I-A football season. The game was the 16th edition of the Fiesta Bowl, played annually since 1971 at Sun Devil Stadium in Tempe, Arizona. This particular Fiesta Bowl was played on January 2, 1987 and pitted the #1 Miami Hurricanes against the #2 Penn State Nittany Lions. Since the game would determine the college football national champion for the 1986 season, the organizers of the Fiesta Bowl — which, since it established itself as a January bowl, had been played in the afternoon — decided to move the game back from New Year's Day to January 2 and play it in the early evening (Arizona time) so it could be carried in primetime in the Eastern and Central time zones by NBC, the Fiesta Bowl's then-television carrier. The 1987 Fiesta Bowl drew a 25.1 rating for NBC, which the bowl organizers claimed was a record for any college football game; the 1980 Rose Bowl, which NBC also aired, drew a 28.6 rating but was seen in fewer homes than the Fiesta Bowl, which was viewed in 21.9 million versus the 21.8 million the Rose Bowl had been viewed in.〔http://www.nytimes.com/1987/01/06/sports/fiesta-bowl-sets-record-for-tv.html〕 ==Bowl selection== Although the Fiesta Bowl had been played on New Year's Day since the 1982 game, it was not considered by many to be a major bowl game. Instead, that distinction was given to four other New Year's bowls— the Cotton Bowl, Rose Bowl, Sugar Bowl, and Orange Bowl were all considered major bowls. Each of these bowls was required to take at least one conference's champion as per their charters regardless of the team's rank; the Southwest Conference champion hosted the Cotton Bowl, the Big Ten Conference and Pac-10 Conference played each other in the Rose Bowl, the Big 8 Conference champion hosted the Orange Bowl, and the Southeastern Conference champion hosted the Sugar Bowl. The Fiesta Bowl, meanwhile, had not had a tie in with a conference since the Western Athletic Conference's contract with the game expired in 1978. Although in most of the years since a team in the western United States received an invitation to the bowl, the Fiesta Bowl was free to extend an invitation to anyone who they desired. The climate of college football was different in 1986 as opposed to today. In those days some high profile programs competed as independents, meaning they were free to schedule any school they wanted to play and were able to be picked by almost any bowl organizing committee. If an independent was ranked either first or second, they would likely be invited to one of the other bowls such as the Orange, Sugar, or Cotton Bowls as the team ranked ahead of or behind them would have automatically qualified for one of these bowls. In fact, both Penn State and Miami's previous national championships were won this way. The 1982 Penn State squad, ranked #1, took on and defeated #2 Georgia in the Sugar Bowl. The next season, Miami had a chance to win the national title in their home stadium against #1 Nebraska in the Orange Bowl and did. In 1986, however, things were different as the top two teams at the end of the season were independents. This required a different plan as to how to resolve this, due to the fact that neither team had contractual ties to a bowl. All of the bowl games had been set except for the one that Miami and Penn State would be playing in for the national championship. The Fiesta Bowl selection committee's only opposition came from the organizers of the Citrus Bowl in Orlando, which like the Fiesta Bowl was not locked in to taking anyone from a conference. The bidding process resulted in the game being awarded to the Arizona bowl,〔Looney, Douglas S. - College Football. Sports Illustrated, November 17, 2008.〕 and this allowed the Fiesta Bowl to gain much more national prestige than it had before and eventually enabled it to replace the Cotton Bowl as one of the four major bowl games; the Fiesta Bowl became part of the Bowl Alliance and Bowl Championship Series years later. As noted above, the Fiesta Bowl was usually played in the early afternoon (MST). At the time, the structure of the New Year's Day games saw the Citrus and Cotton Bowls played first, with the Fiesta and Rose Bowls starting around the same time and the Orange and Sugar Bowls played at night at the same time. NBC at the time was the television home for three of the aforementioned bowls, and if the national title was to be decided in one of them airing the Fiesta Bowl early in the day would have been of little benefit. This brought about the shift in dates to the 2nd of January, which ensured the game would not face any competition from any other bowl game that might have been played at the time and helped it gain the record-setting audience it pulled in. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「1987 Fiesta Bowl」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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