The Dixie Rotary Bowl, which matched teams from the Great Northwest Athletic Conference and the Rocky Mountain Athletic Conference, has been discontinued.

Officials of the bowl cited a weak economy and an inability to raise enough sponsorship dollars to support bowl operations as the reasons for scrubbing the 23-year-old bowl game.

The Dixie Rotary Bowl was sanctioned in 1986 as the first postseason college bowl game in Utah. From 1986 to 2005, the bowl matched two-year colleges and was known as the “Biggest Junior College Bowl Game in the Nation.” Local team Dixie State, then a two-year college, was a perennial NJCAA contender and played in all but one of the 20 two-year college bowl contests as the host school.

In 2006, Dixie State reclassified to Division II, and bowl officials recast the game as a Division II bowl, realizing that attendance for a junior college bowl would decline dramatically without a local school participating.

After a transition game in 2006, featuring Dixie State and Fort Lewis, the bowl finalized an agreement to feature top teams from the RMAC and the GNAC that weren’t already participating in the Division II playoffs.

GNAC teams won the last two matchups. Western Oregon beat Colorado Mines, 26-12, in 2007, and Western Washington beat Colorado Mines, 25-10, last year.