The first Mercy Bowl was played on Thanksgiving Day, 1961 in the Los
Angeles Coliseum. The game was a fundraiser played in memory of sixteen
Cal Poly-San Luis Obispo football players killed in a plane crash at
Toledo, OH on October 29, 1960. A second Mercy Bowl was played 10 years
later, in 1971. The second Mercy Bowl was a fundraiser for the fourteen
surviving children of three Cal State Fullerton assistant coaches and a
pilot who died in an airplane crash a month earlier.
