Best FSU Football bowl game for December 24th: 1966 Sun

FSU football isn’t playing in a bowl game this season, so we’re taking a look back at some of the best postseason games for the Seminoles by date.

As the FSU football team learned this season, you can’t win every game all of the time – and that includes the postseason, despite a time period from 1982 to 1995 when the Seminoles won all 14 of the bowl games that they played in.

It also is very uncommon for the Noles to be working during the Christmas holiday time – while we may be used to seeing the garnet and gold on the field during New Years Eve and New Years Day, the Seminoles have never taken the field on Christmas Day and have played just four games all time in the days before it.

The first one of those games took place in the middle of the Bill Peterson era in Tallahassee, where FSU football went from a  team that was fighting for respectability to one that was enjoying winning seasons and bowl games – including working on Christmas Eve for the first time down in the West Texas town of El Paso for the second time ever.

Florida State Seminoles Football

Here’s a look at the best FSU football bowl game the program has played on December 24th.

1966 Sun Bowl – Wyoming 28 Florida State 20

For just the fifth time in the then 20 seasons of FSU football, the Seminoles were back in the postseason after a 6-4 season that included a win over ranked Miami and a controversial loss to the Florida Gators in a game where the Seminoles receiver was clearly in the end zone.

So, after all that, it was off to El Paso to face a Wyoming team that ranked No. 15 in the country and had one of the best running backs out there in Jim Kiick – who would later go on to a career that included two Super Bowl rings with the Miami Dolphins.

Kiick got the Cowboys on the board with a first quarter touchdown, but the Seminoles came right back in the second when Kim Hammond through two touchdown passes – one to Ron Sellers and another to the school’s late president, T.K. Wetherell to give the Noles a halftime lead.

That would be the last bit of fun for the Seminoles as Wyoming scored three straight touchdowns and was able to hold the Noles to -21 yards rushing. Hammond and Sellers would hook up for another score with about one minute left, but that’s as close as it would get and FSU football found itself on the losing end for the third time in a  bowl game.

It would be the start of a three year of bowl games for the Seminoles that included a tie in the 1967 Gator Bowl against Penn State and a loss in the inaugural Peach Bowl in 1968 against LSU – as the Noles wouldn’t win another bowl game until the 1977 season.