The Poinsettia Bowl is coming back to San Diego on Dec. 23, and The CW will carry it at 4:30 p.m. from Snapdragon Stadium. It is the bowl’s first game since 2017, restoring a postseason date that had been missing from the city’s calendar for nearly a decade.
The return gives San Diego two postseason college bowl games in the same stretch for the first time in a decade. The Holiday Bowl follows on Dec. 28 at 2 p.m., also on The CW, setting up a rare December run of back-to-back national television exposure at Snapdragon Stadium.
What makes the Poinsettia Bowl stand out is not just that it is back, but how it is being rebuilt. San Diego County Credit Union is returning as title sponsor after a 12-year run from 2005 to 2016, the kind of stability the game lost when the bowl went dark in 2017. That matters because the bowl is not coming back as a nostalgia project; it is coming back with a defined place in the new postseason map.
The matchup structure helps explain why. The Poinsettia Bowl will pair the new Pac-12 champion, if that team does not reach the College Football Playoff, with a legacy Pac-12 team, and it has the fifth pick after the playoff among those legacy teams. The Holiday Bowl sits a step higher in that pecking order, with the third pick among the legacy Pac-12 teams, and it will match a former Pac-12 team against an ACC opponent.
That setup also puts San Diego State back in the conversation. The school will be among eight teams in the relaunched Pac-12 bidding to play in the bowl game, and it has already lived this game three times. The Aztecs beat Navy 35-14 in 2010, lost to BYU 23-6 in 2012 and fell to Navy 17-16 in 2014. For a program that has already taken the full measure of the Poinsettia Bowl, the return lands with a familiar local tie and a fresh chance at a December stage.
The sponsorship picture is less even on the other side of town. While the Poinsettia Bowl has a title sponsor again, the Holiday Bowl is still without one after being backed last year by Trust & Will. That split is the one unresolved piece in an otherwise clean announcement: both games have dates, both have a network and both have a stadium, but only one has the sponsor structure fully in place.
The broader reset is driven by conference movement and bowl math. The Pac-12 restarted on July 1 and needs to secure bowl tie-ins for its new membership, which includes San Diego State, Boise State, Colorado State, Fresno State and Utah State, with Texas State invited to join Oregon State and Washington State. A new six-year bowl cycle was supposed to begin this year, but bowls and conferences are extending their tie-ins for an additional year while they wait to see whether the College Football Playoff expands next year.
For now, the headline is simple: San Diego has its bowl pair back, the Poinsettia Bowl has a date and a sponsor, and The CW has both games. What remains open is not whether the bowls are returning, but which teams will fill them when December arrives.
