Mac Rating: 5.00 | Votes: 1 | Date: 03/07/2026 02:04:00

The stadium is carved into the Franklin Mountains at 3,910 feet, and the first play ever run in it went 54 yards for a touchdown. Sun Bowl Stadium at 2701 Sun Bowl Drive on the UTEP campus opened on 21 September 1963 with Texas Western's Larry Durham breaking his run on the opening snap - a 30,000-seat county-built bowl that grew to 52,000 in 1982. The stadium carries two football identities: home of the UTEP Miners, and host of the Sun Bowl itself - one of college football's oldest bowl games, played in El Paso since 1935 and televised by CBS since 1969 - under a 99-year county lease at one dollar a year. The 2020 renovation traded raw capacity for comfort, adding club seats, loge boxes, suites, the GECU Terrace and the Foster Tower to settle the count around 46,000 - still the biggest room in far west Texas. The concert history spans the stadium eras: the Rolling Stones, U2, Pink Floyd, Guns N' Roses and One Direction all played the bowl, and RBD chose it to launch their 2023 reunion tour before Coldplay's two sold-out June 2025 nights drew nearly 90,000 and an estimated 35-million-dollar economic jolt. The border geography is the stadium's superpower - Ciudad Juarez sits minutes away, and binational crowds have made El Paso dates outperform larger markets, a fact the touring industry has increasingly priced in with BTS and Post Malone bookings following Coldplay. The record crowd of 53,415 watched Texas visit in 2008, nearly eight million fans have passed the turnstiles, and the mountain-cut bowl remains among the most distinctive settings in American college football. The county built the stadium with 1.5 million dollars in voter-approved bonds and the university's regents funded the 1982 upper deck from Permanent University Fund proceeds - a civic-academic bargain sealed by the dollar-a-year lease that still requires the stadium be released for the bowl game and community events each December.