The 2003 Insight Bowl was a post-season American college football bowl game between the Virginia Tech Hokies and the California Golden Bears. The game was the final contest of the 2003 NCAA Division I-A football season for both teams, and ended in a 52–49 victory for California. Virginia Tech and Cal combined for 101 points; only the 2001 GMAC Bowl saw more points scored by two teams in a bowl game without overtime.
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The 2003 Insight Bowl was a post-season American college football bowl game between the Virginia Tech Hokies and the California Golden Bears. The game was the final contest of the 2003 NCAA Division I-A football season for both teams, and ended in a 52–49 victory for California. Virginia Tech and Cal combined for 101 points; only the 2001 GMAC Bowl saw more points scored by two teams in a bowl game without overtime. The Hokies entered the 2003 college football season having gone 10–4 the previous season, including a season-ending victory over Air Force in the inaugural San Francisco Bowl. In the preseason, Virginia Tech was picked to finish third in the Big East Conference, behind the previous year’s champion, Miami and Pittsburgh. On October 11, a fourth-ranked Hokie squad easily won its first game of the season against Syracuse University, 51–7. In a game that saw the debut of quarterback Marcus Vick, 10th-ranked Virginia Tech pulled out an early lead before Central Florida fought back in the second half and won the game 48–29. On December 26, 2003, the Insight Bowl kicked off at 8: 30 p.m. m. EST in Phoenix, Arizona, with the Hokies taking a 49–49 lead into the fourth quarter. As time expired, Cal kicker Tyler Fredrickson kicked a 35-yard field goal to give California the 52-49 win. The Insight Bowl is the only bowl game in which both teams have won at least one game in each of the last three seasons.
It is also the last bowl game to be played in which the teams did not face each other in the regular season. It was also the first bowl game where both teams were selected by the same conference, the Pac-10, and the Continental Tire Bowl, which was held in Charlotte, North Carolina, in the offseason. In 2003, Big East champion Miami was awarded an automatic Bowl Championship Series berth, and second-place Pittsburgh accepted a bid to the Continental Tire Bowl. California’s route to the Insightbowl was less roundabout, with first-place Southern California awarded the conference’s Bowl Championship series bid, and Oregon, tied for third place with California, won the teams’ head-to-head matchup. Tech accepted an invitation to join the Atlantic Coast Conference, and accepted, making the 2003 season their final year in theBig East. The Big East and Continental Tire bowls did not choose to pick a team that faced each other on the final day of the regular-season, so they chose another team. The other team was the San Francisco Bowl, whose managers also held a contract with the Big East, but the bowl’s organizing committee decided against a second invitation because Tech played in the previous year’s San Francisco Bowl, but because Tech play in the San Francois Bowl, the committee decided not to extend a second invitation. The Insight Bowl was played at Bank One Ballpark in Phoenix.
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This page is based on the article 2003 Insight Bowl published in Wikipedia (as of Nov. 05, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
