The Sun Bowl has a new name, and it is a very El Paso one
Old El Paso replaced Tony the Tiger as title sponsor this month. The 93rd game is still December 31, still on CBS, still cut into the side of the mountain.
On September 17 the Sun Bowl Association announced that Old El Paso — the General Mills Tex-Mex brand, which is named after this city and made nowhere near it — is the new title sponsor of the game. It replaces Tony the Tiger, the Kellogg’s mascot that had fronted the bowl for years.
So the 93rd edition will be played as the Old El Paso Sun Bowl on December 31, kicking off at noon Mountain time on CBS.
Why anyone cares
The Sun Bowl is the second-oldest bowl game in college football and the most visible national broadcast this city gets all year. For a few hours on New Year’s Eve, the network cameras sit above a stadium blasted into the side of the Franklin Mountains, and the rest of the country gets a look at the place.
The sponsor name rides on all of it — the logo at midfield, the crawl on the scoreboard, the way announcers say it forty times an afternoon. Local reaction has been mixed in the way you would expect: a Tex-Mex brand sponsoring the El Paso bowl game is either perfect or slightly absurd, depending on which barstool you ask from.
What is unchanged
- Same date: December 31.
- Same stadium: the Sun Bowl on the UTEP campus.
- Same parade: the Sun Bowl Parade still runs downtown on Thanksgiving morning, November 26 this year.
If you have never been, the parade is the better introduction to the city. The game sells the postcard; the parade is where you actually meet El Paso.