The 2008 Pioneer Las Vegas Bowl was an

NCAA The National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) is a nonprofit organization that regulates student athletics among about 1,100 schools in the United States, Canada, and Puerto Rico. It also organizes the athletic programs of colleges an ...

-sanctioned

Division I FBS The NCAA Division I Football Bowl Subdivision (FBS), formerly known as Division I-A, is the highest level of college football in the United States. The FBS consists of the largest schools in the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA). A ...

post-season college football

bowl game In North America, a bowl game is one of a number of post-season college football games that are primarily played by teams belonging to the NCAA's Division I Football Bowl Subdivision (FBS). For most of its history, the Division I Bowl Subdivi ...

between the BYU Cougars (third place overall in the

Mountain West Conference The Mountain West Conference (MW) is one of the collegiate athletic conferences affiliated with the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) Division I Football Bowl Subdivision (FBS) (formerly I-A). The MW officially began operations ...

) and the Arizona Wildcats (fifth pick from the Pacific-10 Conference). The game was played on December 20, 2008, starting at 5 p.m. PST at 40,000-seat off campus

Sam Boyd Stadium Sam Boyd Stadium (formerly the Las Vegas Silver Bowl) is a football stadium in the western United States, located in Whitney, Nevada, an unincorporated community in the Las Vegas Valley. It honors Sam Boyd (1910–1993), a major figure in the hot ...

of the

University of Nevada, Las Vegas The University of Nevada, Las Vegas (UNLV) is a public land-grant research university in Paradise, Nevada. The campus is about east of the Las Vegas Strip. It was formerly part of the University of Nevada from 1957 to 1969. It includes th ...

. The Wildcats stunned the 16th ranked Cougars in the coldest Las Vegas Bowl in history, 31–21. It was televised on

ESPN ESPN (originally an initialism for Entertainment and Sports Programming Network) is an American international basic cable sports channel owned by ESPN Inc., owned jointly by The Walt Disney Company (80%) and Hearst Communications (20%). Th ...

. The announcers were Mike Patrick and Todd Blackledge with the sideline reporting by Holly Rowe. Starting in 2001, the

Las Vegas Bowl The Las Vegas Bowl is an NCAA Division I FBS annual post-season college football bowl game held in the Las Vegas area. First played in 1992, the bowl was originally held at the 40,000-seat Sam Boyd Stadium in Whitney, Nevada before moving to the ...

featured a matchup of teams from Mountain West and the Pac-10.

Scoring summary

References

Las Vegas Bowl BYU Cougars football bowl games Arizona Wildcats football bowl games

December 2008 sports events in the United States {{Collegefootball-bowl-stub