The 2016 Las Vegas Bowl was a college football bowl game that was played on December 17, 2016, at Sam Boyd Stadium in Las Vegas, Nevada. The twenty-fifth annual Las Vegas Bowl is one of the 2016–17 bowl games that concludes the 2016 FBS football season. The game aired on ABC. Previously sponsored by lubricant manufactuer Royal Purple, the sponsorship ended in 2015, with the name of the bowl game reverting to the official name of the Las Vegas Bowl.

The game would have featured teams from the Mountain West Conference and Pac-12 Conference. However, since the Pac-12 had only six bowl-eligible teams, and two of them qualified for New Years Six bowls, the sixth-place Pac-12 team was unavailable. Instead, the bowl elected to invite the Houston Cougars of the American Athletic Conference. This was the first time an AAC team played in the Las Vegas Bowl. The representative from the Mountain West was San Diego State, which qualified for the bowl by winning the 2016 Mountain West Conference Football Championship Game. Houston played in its first-ever Las Vegas Bowl, while San Diego State appeared for a second time, the first being a 1998 loss to North Carolina.

This was the third meeting between the schools, with Houston having won both previous ones. The most recent prior meeting was on October 6, 1973, when the Cougars defeated the Aztecs by a score of 14–9.

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