Orange Bowl embracing hosting new teams in Oregon, Texas Tech for first time
There will be something new about the Orange Bowl this year.
For starters, it’s the first time the marquee bowl game will serve as a College Football Playoff semifinal with the field expanded to 12 teams for just the second time. The Orange Bowl was a semifinal last season and has served as a semifinal game three other times — in the 2015, 2018 and 2021 seasons.
Second is the timing. Kickoff from Hard Rock Stadium is scheduled for noon on Thursday, making the customarily late-night Orange Bowl an afternoon game this year.
And then there’s the matter of the matchup. For the first time since the meeting between Clemson and West Virginia on Jan. 4, 2012, the Orange Bowl will feature two teams playing in the game for the first time in the No. 4 Texas Tech Red Raiders (12-1) and No. 5 Oregon Ducks (12-1). It’s just the fourth meeting of first-timers in the Orange Bowl since the turn of the century, with the others being Louisville vs. Wake Forest on Jan. 2, 2007, and USC vs. Iowa on Jan. 2, 2003.
“It’s very exciting,” Eric Poms, CEO of the Orange Bowl Committee, told the Miami Herald. “I mean, through the BCS and now CFP eras, Oregon came close to coming to the Orange Bowl many times; it just never seemed to work out. And ultimately, this year, it did. Just one of the premier programs in college football. Excited about that, coupled with Texas Tech — one of the great stories of college football this year. Great respect for the program they built. Kirby Hocutt, the athletic director, he used to be at the University of Miami [as AD from 2008-2011]. I stayed very close with Kirby. I would see him through the years, and we’d always joke around about, ‘Hey, we need to get Texas Tech to the Orange Bowl.’ And here they are.
“When you do this for as many years as the Orange Bowl has been around, you come to realize when you have programs that are experiencing the bowl game for the first time, and in the case of Texas Tech the first College Football Playoff appearance, it’s exciting. At the end of the day, what’s most important is the teams, the student athletes, the coaches, the support staff and making their memories as great as possible. So we’re focused in on that and excited to have this matchup.”
Prior to games dubbed the New Year’s Six Bowls — the Orange, Cotton, Rose, Sugar, Peach and Fiesta — being looped into the College Football Playoff bracket, each bowl had its own conference tie-ins. The Orange Bowl, for example, had taken the top-ranked Atlantic Coast Conference team since 1999 and matched them against another marquee team from a top conference — the Big East from 1999-2006 and then, eventually, a top team from either the Southeastern Conference, Big Ten or Notre Dame starting in 2014.
But the matchups at these games are now determined by the draw of the 12-team field.
So the Orange Bowl committee was just like everyone else in the college football world on Dec. 7, waiting in anticipation when the CFP selection committee formally set the field so that they would know which teams could possibly be coming down to Miami Gardens for the quarterfinal.
“We’re watching it just like you’re watching it,” Poms said.
They ultimately got Texas Tech as a guaranteed team at the game, set to face the winner of the first-round matchup between Oregon and No. 12 seed James Madison. Oregon won that game 51-34 on Dec. 20.
The teams arrive in South Florida on Monday ahead of their Thursday afternoon matchup.
“It’s more condensed now than it’s been historically because of the multi-round playoff,” Poms said of the teams’ experience leading up to the Orange Bowl. “You try to preserve some of the historical elements that bowl games provide to visiting institutions, but with the same token, it’s a business trip. It’s a road to the national championship game. You want to create an environment that’s very conducive to getting ready for such a game of relevance, but there’s an opportunity to provide experiences that give an indigenous element of what Miami and South Florida are all about.”
This story was originally published December 28, 2025 at 11:41 AM.
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