A unique half-time promotion for the Holiday Bowl is raising some eyebrows. Its new sponsorship partners, estate planners Trust & Will, cooked up an “Inheritance Toss” for its first bowl game, in which a contestant wins $10,000 if they can throw a football into a festive casket. (The previous iteration of the contest offered just $1,000, but they upped the ante this week.)
“The feedback so far with the inheritance toss has been consistent with the spirt of how it was intended — people think it’s funny and unique,” said Mark Neville, chief executive officer of Sports San Diego, the nonprofit organization that produces the Holiday Bowl.
Many people have been asking us, "Will there be an opportunity at the @trustandwill Holiday Bowl to win money by throwing a football into a casket?" The answer, surprisingly, is "Yes." pic.twitter.com/RB0CSn1AJo
— Trust & Will Holiday Bowl (@holidaybowl) December 20, 2025It’s also not the first unusual Holiday Bowl promotion, some of which have gone on to become regional events of their own.
“Don’t forget about our wiener dog races — the Wienerschnitzel Wiener Dog Races!” Neville added. “Or how about the Jack in the Box Teriyaki Bowl, an on-field contest that challenged a fan to jump into a kiddie pool filled with teriyaki sauce and find Jack in the Box gift cards?”
The attention-grabbing marketing campaigns and mascots have been a part of bowl games throughout their history, with intentionally and sometimes unintentionally hilarious promotions as part of the fun.
But as bowl games slip in popularity, their mascots and promotions have become more attention-grabbing, sometimes veering over the line into demented. One fan site calls them “unhinged bowl season traditions.”
For example, the Pop-Tarts Bowl’s mascot is an anthropomorphized Pop Tart that comes out of a gigantic toaster, gleefully anticipating its own death by devouring. The scenes are reminiscent of Douglas Adams’ famous passage, in the sci-fi comedy classic “The Restaurant at the End of the Universe,” about an animal bred to want to be eaten.
“I am the main Dish of the Day. May I interest you in the parts of my body?” asks that creature. “May I urge you, sir, to consider my liver?”
But these comparisons haven’t troubled fans. The Pop-Tarts Bowl MVP picks which flavor will be sacrificed, then after the game players slit open the mascot’s still-warm body and devour it with their bare hands.
Less feral but still strange mascots abound in the bowl game world, such as Tubby, Duke’s mascot, which is a gigantic jar of mayonnaise with legs, arms, eyes and eyebrows (but no mouth), and Spuddy Buddy, Idaho’s humanized, oversized, grinning potato, which transforms into French fries and is ritually consumed after the game.
And then there’s whatever this was on Tuesday at the Boca Raton Bowl of Beans (actual name), in which baked beans took center stage after the game.
The game is still the thing for some people, Inheritance Toss, mayo and beans aside. For those fans, the Arizona Wildcats will face off against the SMU Mustangs at 5 p.m. Pacific time at Snapdragon Stadium on Jan. 2, 2026.
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