Bowl Arrangements
An Arizona State win over Cal, combined with a UCLA loss to Stanford, enabled the Sun Devils to clinch the Pac-10 and Rose Bowl Berth on November 8. The early clinching of the Rose Bowl bid for Arizona State began a scramble for all the Bowl games to confirm teams before the bids were to be extended on November 22. The Michigan loss on November 15 set Miami and Penn State at #1 and #2. The Cotton Bowl offered to take the loser of the Michigan-Ohio State rivalry game, as the winner would go to the 1987 Rose Bowl. With Penn State and Miami already written off to the bidding winner between the Fiesta and Citrus bowls, the other bowls made similar arrangements to take second-place teams.
With Miami and Penn State the top 2 teams in the nation, and both independent teams unaffiliated with any conferences or bowl tie-ins, there was an opportunity to create a #1-2 matchup in what were widely seen as a second-tier bowls By November 17, The Citrus Bowl, which had planned to pay $875,000 per team, was offering about $2.6 million apiece to Miami and Penn State to land the game; the Fiesta, which normally pays $1.1 million per, was offering around $2.4 million and was poised to go higher. The Sugar Bowl, Cotton Bowl and Orange Bowl all had payouts in the neighborhood of $2 million. The Rose Bowl paid $6 million per team.
This would be only the 21st time since 1936 that #1 would face #2, and only the 7th time in a Bowl game. It was only the fifth time in college football history that there had been two #1 vs #2 games in the same football season.
Read more about this topic: 1987 Fiesta Bowl
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—Althea Gibson (b. 1927)
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