[4] The following year, the Gotham Bowl managed to find two teams to play, Baylor and Utah State, for the game at the Polo Grounds.
(It was the penultimate college football game played at the Polo Grounds; Army defeated Syracuse 9–2 in front of 29,500 on September 29, 1962.)
The 1962 edition of the Gotham Bowl, played in Yankee Stadium, was particularly tormented with poor planning and bad luck.
Finally, on December 4, 1962, just eleven days before the game, the Gotham Bowl invited Nebraska, which had just finished an 8–2 season under first-year head coach Bob Devaney.
However, the day before the contest, the pilot of the Cornhuskers' team plane refused to leave the Lincoln airport until the bowl's check for expenditures cleared, which it did.