Miami Hurricanes-Penn State Fiesta Bowl precipice to College Football Playoff

In a 2007 article for ESPN Michael Weinreb

titled his story

“The Night College Football Went to Hell: Trash Talk, the BCS, Corporate Sponsorships, it All began 20 years ago with Miami-Penn State.”

The game played on January 2, 1987, was the first one versus two matchup of Independents in a bowl game.

The matchup between Miami and Penn State was the precipice to the BCS and later the college football playoff. The 1987 season coupled with the shared national championship Miami had with Washington in 1991 created an outcry nationally to match up the best teams in a bowl game to decide the title.

The Athletic revisited the 1990s and credited the impact that the Miami Penn State Fiesta Bowl had on the future of college football. Michael Weinreb summarized the influence of the highest-rated game in the history of college football history.

"“In 1986, the season culminated with one of the highest-rated college football games in modern history: Penn State’s monumental upset of Miami in the Fiesta Bowl, a game that had been moved to Jan. 2 in order to maximize the television ratings. By the time the 1990s arrived, the clamor for games like Penn State-Miami had grown louder. And then came 1990 and 1991, with their utterly unsatisfying denouements, thanks to the rigid rules of the system. The fans were griping, and the playoff talk was getting louder (former ACC commissioner Gene Corrigan told author Keith Dunnavan). Everybody knew we had to do something. In an attempt to satisfy all parties, college football took a tiny step forward. It was called the Bowl Coalition, and it was an advancement over the status quo, but it was still driven largely by the bureaucrats in the garish sportcoats. The only metric for choosing the top teams would be the Associated Press poll. And the Rose Bowl, with its granddaddy status and traditional matchup of Big Ten versus Pac-10? That wouldn’t be touched, no matter the rankings. Did it work? Kind of. In 1992, Miami did wind up playing Alabama in a No. 1 versus No. 2 game for the national championship.”"

The week leading up to the game created hype that had not been seen before in college football. Miami got off the plane at Phoenix Sky Harbor Airport wearing fatigues. That drew a lot of criticism in that era. Some of the comments and observations were clearly racially motivated.

Penn State was viewed as the more clean-cut team. The image the 1986 Miami Hurricanes created pre Fiesta Bowl week was the forerunner of the Catholics versus Convicts game against Notre Dame two years later. The Hurricanes came off the plane talking trash and created the swagger they were known for.

Although Miami lost that game it helped form the Jimmy Johnson era. The loss to Penn State motivated Miami to in the 1987 National Title, the only one under Johnson. Penn State’s Fiesta Bowl victory was the last loss Miami would have until the controversial defeat in South Bend in 1988.