The Holiday Bowl is a post-season NCAA Division I Football Bowl Subdivision college football bowl game that has been played in San Diego since 1978. San Diego County Credit Union has been the game's title sponsor since 2017, and the bowl has been officially known as the San Diego County Credit Union Holiday Bowl. Past editions of the bowl were played at San Diego Stadium. Future editions are planned to be played at Petco Park in San Diego, under a five-year arrangement reached in 2021. Petco Park, the baseball park of the San Diego Padres, will be reconfigured to accommodate a football field. San Diego Stadium was demolished beginning in the autumn of 2020. The bowl was not played following the 2020 and 2021 seasons, due to impact from the COVID-19 pandemic. History The Holiday Bowl was founded in 1978 to give the Western Athletic Conference an automatic bowl bid after the Fiesta Bowl, which previously had a tie-in with the conference, ended its association with the WAC following the departure of Arizona and Arizona State (the latter of which served as the game's host) to join the Pacific-8 Conference in the summer of 1978. The Holiday Bowl inherited the Fiesta Bowl's former WAC ties and gave the conference's champion its automatic bid. For the first several editions, the WAC champion played an at-large team; from 1991 through 1994, the Big Ten Conference was given the second bid, provided it had enough bowl-eligible teams. Beginning in 1995, the Big Eight Conference replaced the Big Ten and remained tied with the bowl through as the conference expanded to become the Big 12 the following year. The WAC's automatic bid was split, with first choice given to the Cotton Bowl Classic in Dallas, and a team from the Pacific-10 Conference was added as the alternate pick (meaning that, if the WAC champion played in the Cotton Bowl, a Pac-10 team would play in the Holiday Bowl). The WAC ended its association with the Holiday Bowl after 1997, and the game became a matchup between the Big 12 and Pac-10. From 1998 to 2009, the matchup featured the #2 Pac-12 team and the #3 Big 12 team, but the Alamo Bowl outbid the Holiday Bowl to feature that matchup beginning in 2010. Holiday Bowl Executive Director Bruce Binkowski stated that average ticket prices for the Holiday Bowl would have had to be increased