2005 Liberty Bowl

The 2005 Liberty Bowl was a post-season college football bowl game between the Fresno State Bulldogs and the Tulsa Golden Hurricane played on December 31, 2005, at Liberty Bowl Memorial Stadium in Memphis, Tennessee. In a closely contested game that went back and forth, Tulsa defeated Fresno State, 31–24. It was the 47th time the Liberty Bowl had been played, and was the final game of the 2005 NCAA Division I-A football season for both teams. With sponsorship from AutoZone, the game was officially the AutoZone Liberty Bowl.

The game between Fresno State from the Western Athletic Conference (WAC) and the Conference USA (C-USA) champion Tulsa was played at neutral-site Liberty Bowl Memorial Stadium (Tulsa was once a WAC member, but joined C-USA in 2005). Tulsa automatically qualified for the Liberty Bowl after defeating Central Florida in the C-USA Championship Game. Normally, Tulsa would have faced TCU, the Mountain West Conference champion, but the Liberty Bowl's tie-in with the Mountain West had ended after 2004 and TCU opted for the Houston Bowl.^[1] Instead, the bowl organizers invited Fresno State. Fresno's invite came on November 23, 2005, just days after it lost to the then-No. 1 USC Trojans, 50–42.^[2] This was Fresno State's first appearance in a bowl game east of the Mississippi River.^[3]