2007 Holiday Bowl
The 2007 Pacific Life Holiday Bowl was a college football bowl game played December 27, 2007 in San Diego. It was part of the 2007 NCAA Division I FBS football season and one of 32 games in the 2007–2008 bowl season. It featured the Texas Longhorns against the Arizona State Sun Devils. Texas won 52–34 and set Holiday Bowl records for the earliest score and for most points scored in the first quarter. Texas also set a school record for most points scored in a bowl game. A bizarre play involving Chris Jessee, a member of the Longhorn football operations staff and the stepson of the Texas head coach, has been cited as one of the strangest plays of the season.
2007 Fiesta Bowl
Boise State also became just the second team from a non-AQ (automatic qualifier) conference team to both play in and win a BCS bowl game (the 2004 Utah Utes team was the first, playing in the 2005 Fiesta Bowl). However, the presence of Boise State, a non-AQ school, quite possibly led to some of the lowest TV ratings ever for a BCS game. Of the 37 BCS bowl games played through the 2006 season, only two received lower ratings than this game—the 2005 Fiesta Bowl, the only other BCS game up to that time to feature a non-AQ school (although this most likely was due to getting stuck with a clearly over-matched Pitt team from the Big East – who did receive an AQ bid – and the resulting blow-out was not a surprise, in any way); and the 2007 Orange Bowl, which featured two non-traditional teams in Louisville and Wake Forest (although, to be fair, both of these teams were AQ conference champions, were awarded the guaranteed spots in a BCS bowls due to their conference memberships in the Big East Conference and the Atlantic Coast Conference, respectively, and were presumably supposed to be bigger draws, whereas neither 2004 Utah nor 2006 Boise State had automatic bids as a conference champions and yet both outscored them in ratings in their games).