California Bowl
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The California Bowl was a post-season college football bowl game played annually in Fresno, California, from 1981 to 1991. The games matched the championship teams from the Big West Conference (formerly the Pacific Coast Athletic Association) with teams from the Mid-American Conference. During the bowl's existence it was generally the first "major" bowl game (one involving teams from NCAA Division I-A) played during the bowl season. It was generally regarded as one of the lower-profile bowl games in that the conferences involved were generally considered at the time to be at the lowest level of "major"-college football, and was one of the first bowls largely to restrict its television marketing efforts to the medium of cable television, which was just beginning to emerge as a mainstream technology at the time that the bowl was started. It was sometimes referred to as the California Raisin Bowl in contemporary accounts, perhaps a historical reference to the Raisin Bowl formerly played at the same location, but primarily due to the purchase of naming rights in the games by the California Raisin Marketing Board. Fresno State largely dominated this game, playing in five of the 11 games and winning four of them.
Results by year:
- 12/19/1981 Toledo 27, San Jose State 25
- 12/18/1982 Fresno State 29, Bowling Green 28
- 12/17/1983 Northern Illinois 20, Cal State-Fullerton 13
- 12/15/1984 UNLV 30, Toledo 13
- 12/14/1985 Fresno State 51, Bowling Green 7
- 12/13/1986 San Jose State 37, Miami-Ohio 7
- 12/12/1987 Eastern Michigan 30, San Jose State 27
- 12/10/1988 Fresno State 35, Western Michigan 30
- 12/09/1989 Fresno State 27, Ball State 6
- 12/08/1990 San Jose State 48, Central Michigan 24
- 12/14/1991 Bowling Green 28, Fresno State 21