when is the cotton bowl 2026

The 2026 Cotton Bowl (for the 2025–26 college football season) is scheduled to be played on Wednesday, December 31, 2025.

Quick Scoop

• The Cotton Bowl in the expanded College Football Playoff format serves as a quarterfinal game in the 2025–26 season.

• For that season, it is listed on the bowl schedule on Wednesday, Dec. 31, 2025, with a 7:30 p.m. ET kickoff at AT &T Stadium in Arlington, Texas.

• Some ticket and fan sites casually label this matchup as the “Cotton Bowl 2026” because it is part of the 2025–26 bowl season , but the actual calendar date of the game is New Year’s Eve 2025.

In short: if you see “Cotton Bowl 2026” in schedules or on ticket sites, they are referring to the 2025–26 season’s Cotton Bowl, which is played on December 31, 2025.

TL;DR: When people say “when is the Cotton Bowl 2026,” they almost always mean the 2025–26 season Cotton Bowl, and that game is on December 31, 2025, at 7:30 p.m. ET.

Information gathered from public forums or data available on the internet and portrayed here.